PEFT (Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning)

Friendly Description: PEFT is a family of clever techniques for customizing a big AI model by changing only a small slice of it, instead of retraining everything. It's like adjusting just the trim and paint of a house instead of rebuilding from the foundation. PEFT methods make customization much cheaper, faster, and more accessible to smaller teams.

Example: A small startup that wants its own customer-service AI doesn't need to spend millions training a model from scratch. With PEFT, they can take a powerful open-source model and tweak just a tiny portion of it on their own data, getting a specialized model in days for a fraction of the cost.