Open weights, real stakes
The Fifth Elephant
The Fifth Elephant

Open weights, real stakes

Battle stories from engineers who have shipped with Open Weights/Sovereign AI models

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Prathamesh Kalamkar

Prathamesh Kalamkar

@prathameshkalamkar Presenter

Fine-Tuning an LLM: The Lessons We Learned the Hard Way

Submitted Jul 8, 2026

Fine-tuning an LLM looks deceptively simple, but the real challenges often lie beyond the training code.
In this talk, I share our experience building Aalap, an open-source LLM for Indian legal tasks. We will look at the choices we made, the experiments that surprised us, and the things that did not work as expected.
A practitioner’s account of lessons learned the hard way while fine-tuning a domain-specific LLM.

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