Free Open-Source Artificial Intelligence

Apologies if this seems like a survey post. I’m just learning about tuning and want to get a lay of the land. I don’t think I have the money to tune locally so might have to rent some VRAM, but curious how much better tuning is vs something like RAG.

What model? What was your use case? What tuning tool did you use? What is hardware setup? How large was your training set and how did you create it? How effective was the model as tasks pre- and post-tuning?

Thanks!