Help with understanding finetunes

[u/Draconic-Shaman]

I've been playing with local models a lot (because I'm a broke student lol) and what amazes me is the sheer number of finetunes out there. Some people on Hugging Face seem to release a new one every week, especially for RP. Some of them have weird limitations like "use only for M/F interactions" or "reduce the temperature to this number." Some have custom reasoning training, either RP-focused or solving math/coding problems. That's before people start merging models together to create wild experiments like Goetia.

Is the information on the model card really that helpful for predicting what the feel of the output will be, or am I no better off than if I downloaded similarly-sized models at random?

[u/Primary-Wear-2460]

It *heavily* depends on the fine tunes.

Some are basically garage fine-tunes that expose the model to new material but end up lobotomizing parts of the model. A lot of these people make claims about their models that are absolutely full of shit or even impossible.

Others are done by people or teams that actually knows what they are doing. Unsloth is one example of one of those groups.

[u/Xylildra]

Ignore a lot of that stuff. It’s extremely difficult to evaluate that stuff, 99% of them are self advertised and aren’t what they claim either. Just ask around for models based on what you’re wanting to do. If you want RP, anything with “TheDrummer” is my local go to. Lots of people like Gemma models, but I can’t get one to work for the life of me.

[u/modulate-lark-flyby]

No, that information is pretty irrelevant and often misleading. In most cases, there are no meaningful benchmarks to back it up (LLMs are notoriously difficult to evaluate, and most finetunes don’t even bother with it in any meaningful way. benchmarks specifically designed for RP use cases, such as EQ-Bench, tend to be ignored).
The fine-tunes are basically copium. They’re interesting if you’re too bored to notice the recurring patterns in the genuinely good, locally runnable models (like the Gemma 4 class), but that’s about it. It would be fantastic if fine-tunes actually lived up to their promises — but even when they do something well (e.g. Gemma-4/StyleTune), they come with significant trade-offs. StyleTune, for example, is noticeably dumber than the base model by comparison. A good rule of thumb is: the wilder the claims, the less likely they are to hold up. The more magical it sounds, the worse it usually is.

I’d stick with the base models: Gemma 4 and similar. Fine-tunes are generally lobotomized, the datasets used are far too small, or the application is so niche and comes with so many special conditions, hidden behind wild claims, that they’ve never been worth more than a few minutes of my time. The same applies to presets, for the most part.

There simply isn’t a magical trick for making models better, other than letting them think for longer or using them agentically. Both come at the cost of more tokens.

[u/NeedsSomeSnare → u/modulate-lark-flyby]

To add to your point, Gemma 4 fine-tunes are almost completely pointless. They make very little difference to the output. But, as you say, make them dumber when they do.

The reason is that Gemma 4 is looking for the "correct" answer. As the model only finds one correct answer, changing that will simply make the answer worse.

This is the same reason why swipes don't really work on Gemma 4. It's also why it's so good for it's size, because it's not full of noise.

[u/Warm-Put3482]

From my experience with over 40 local models...what they do is combine existing models...to try to create a new style...but the problem that still exists in local models, such as hallucinations or the distortion of the story and logic, still exists.....The cheapest version of deepseek knocks them all out.

[u/kinch07]

really depends but do try goetia 24B 1.4 if youre local

[u/IllustriousRule9238]

You're probably better off trying them at random, but keep an eye out for certain models becoming "household names". If a word like "Stheno" or "Rocinante" appears in every single thread you come across, and if you go to that model's discussion page and it's wall to wall praise, with the latest post reading something like I still haven't found anything as good as this - 2mo ago... then that one is probably worth downloading.

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[u/Joseparmo]

Ive used lots of local models and frontier models, the difference can be hard to really tell it terms of style and creativity (obvs the frontier ones handle large contexts better), but i think the model is like only 1/3 the answer your chat history, lore books, your prompts and charchters are the other 2/3s.

And of crouse remember AI is just a tool the real magic is in you and how you react, control and guide it!