--- title: Is Fine-Tuning Still Needed? LLMs, RAG, & LoRA | daily.dev description: A practical look at whether fine-tuning LLMs is still necessary in 2025. Using real examples like a legal AI company and BloombergGPT, it shows how frontier... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/is-fine-tuning-still-needed-llms-rag-lora-6jlt6enbv twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Is Fine-Tuning Still Needed? LLMs, RAG, & LoRA | daily.dev og:description: A practical look at whether fine-tuning LLMs is still necessary in 2025. Using real examples like a legal AI company and BloombergGPT, it shows how frontier... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/is-fine-tuning-still-needed-llms-rag-lora-6jlt6enbv og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/6JLt6EnBV.png og:image:alt: Is Fine-Tuning Still Needed? LLMs, RAG, & LoRA og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Is Fine-Tuning Still Needed? LLMs, RAG, & LoRA **[IBM Technology](https://daily.dev/sources/ibmtechnology)** · 10 min read · 4 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A practical look at whether fine-tuning LLMs is still necessary in 2025. Using real examples like a legal AI company and BloombergGPT, it shows how frontier models have caught up to many custom-trained models due to larger context windows, reasoning capabilities, and cheaper inference. The post outlines a modern customization stack — prompt/context engineering, RAG, and agent skills — that avoids touching model weights entirely. Fine-tuning still has a place for latency-sensitive applications, model distillation, and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), but should be a last resort rather than a first step. LoRA is highlighted as the dominant practical fine-tuning approach today. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Fine-Tuning LLMs in 2026: When RAG Isn't Enough \(and When It Still Is\)](https://daily.dev/posts/fine-tuning-llms-in-2026-when-rag-isn-t-enough-and-when-it-still-is--mddwiz32r) · BigData Boutique blog · 2 upvotes · 0 comments - [Fine-tuning is no longer just an AI research process. It’s becoming a developer workflow.](https://daily.dev/posts/fine-tuning-is-no-longer-just-an-ai-research-process-it-s-becoming-a-developer-workflow--6t1efefmf) · All Things Open · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [LLM Fine-Tuning Developer Guide 2026: When RAG Is Not Enough](https://daily.dev/posts/llm-fine-tuning-developer-guide-2026-when-rag-is-not-enough-muxzzagnz) · Alex CloudStar · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [RAG & Fine-tuning in LLMs](https://daily.dev/posts/rag-fine-tuning-in-llms-yxukggemz) · Daily Dose of Data Science \| Avi Chawla \| Substack · 4 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#deep-learning](https://daily.dev/tags/deep-learning), [#rag](https://daily.dev/tags/rag), [#prompt-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/prompt-engineering), [#lora](https://daily.dev/tags/lora) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/is-fine-tuning-still-needed-llms-rag-lora-6jlt6enbv) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Is Fine-Tuning Still Needed? 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