Context Engineering vs Fine-Tuning: Why Smart AI Founders Are Shifting Strategies

Why Smart AI Founders Are Ditching Fine-Tuning — and Betting on Context Engineering How a painful startup lesson led one NLP veteran to redefine what “intelligence” really means in the AI age. 1. The Startup That Was Crushed by Its Own Model Meet Peak, a co-founder of Manus and a veteran with over 10 years of experience in Natural Language Processing (NLP). A few years ago, Peak launched an ambitious AI startup. Like many others at the time, his team decided to go all in on training their own model. They believed that with enough fine-tuning and computational horsepower, they …