September 15 – September 17, 2026 · Fort Mason Center, San Francisco

AI Builders Summit 2026

Demo conference. The talks, speakers and reviews below are invented for demonstration — nobody named here submitted anything.

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AI EngineeringTalk (30 min)

Fine-Tuning Is Back: Small Models for Narrow Jobs

Hana Sato

When
Thursday, September 1710:15 AM – 10:45 AM · 30 min
Where
Workshop LabFort Mason Center, San Francisco
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About this session

GPU prices fell and our inference bill did not. Where task-specific small models beat frontier APIs, how to run that comparison honestly, and the four jobs where fine-tuning is still the wrong answer.

Speaker

Hana Sato
Hana Sato

Research Engineer, Aperture AI

Hana works on small-model distillation and spends most of her week reading evaluation traces. She was a computational linguist before that and it shows in her error taxonomies.

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