Every engineer building with LLMs eventually hits the fine-tuning question. The answer is usually "not yet."

In this free online session, Gauntlet AI Lead Instructor Aaron Gallant breaks down fine-tuning, PEFT, and QLoRA – what they actually do, what they cost, and when they're worth reaching for over prompt engineering or better context.

You'll walk away understanding how to synthesize training data from frontier models, how parameter-efficient techniques let you train on a laptop, and why the real bottleneck is always the data, not the model.

If you've been curious about fine-tuning but aren't sure it's the right move for your use case, this is the session.

Live. Free. No upsell. Wednesday, June 3 at 5 PM CT. Register here.

Save Your Spot

This morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped the May jobs report, and the headline writers got excited. The economy added 172,000 jobs, more than double the 85,000 economists had penciled in. Unemployment held at 4.3%. Bloomberg called it the strongest three-month stretch in more than two years. If you only read the headline, you would think the market just caught fire.

Then you go back to your inbox, where three applications from last week are still sitting unread, and you wonder what is wrong with you.

Here is the truth nobody puts in the headline: a "beat" only means the number cleared a low bar. Economists expected almost nothing, so almost anything looked like a win. And the jobs that did get added were not spread evenly. Leisure and hospitality alone added 70,000, with restaurants and bars accounting for 48,000 of those. Health care and local government did most of the rest. Meanwhile financial services shed 22,000 jobs, transportation and warehousing is down 92,000 from its 2025 peak, and professional and business services, the white-collar engine, added a grand total of 6,000.

So if you are in finance, logistics, an office role, or anything early-career and analytical, you are not imagining it. You are job hunting in a different economy than the one the headline is describing. Today we break down what this report actually means for your search, and what to do about it starting this morning.

The single most damaging thing a jobseeker can do right now is read "172,000 jobs added" and turn it into "everyone is getting hired except me." The aggregate number is an average across a deeply split market, and you do not live in the average. You live in one sector, one title, one metro area.

The long-term unemployment data tells the real story. Two million people have now been out of work for 27 weeks or longer, up by 524,000 over the past year. That group is now 27.5% of everyone unemployed. Translation: more people are stuck in longer searches than a year ago, even as the headline jobs number looks healthy. If your search is taking months, you are in a large and growing club, and it reflects the market, not your worth as a candidate.

Reset your benchmark today. Instead of asking "why isn't anyone hiring," ask "who is hiring in my specific lane, and how do I get in front of them." That reframe is the difference between spiraling and strategizing.

The report is basically a treasure map if you read past the first line. Hiring in May was concentrated in health care, local government, leisure and hospitality, and food services. Those are not glamorous categories, but they are where the open roles and the hiring momentum actually are right now.

This does not mean abandon your career to go wait tables. It means look for the adjacent role inside a growing sector. Health systems hire recruiters, analysts, marketers, IT, finance, and operations people, not just clinicians. Local government and the public sector are quietly hiring across functions while private finance contracts. If your function got hammered (finance, transportation, professional services), the fastest path back to work is often the same job title inside an industry that is still adding headcount.

On SCALIS, filter by industry, not just by job title. A "financial analyst" opening at a hospital network or a municipality is a very different probability bet than the same title at a bank that just cut 22,000 roles nationwide.

Wage growth slowed to 3.4% over the past year, the weakest pace since 2021, and it is now lagging inflation. That has two implications you can use immediately.

First, employers know raises have cooled, which means switching jobs is still one of the only reliable ways to get a real bump. If you are currently employed and underpaid, this market still rewards a move more than it rewards loyalty. Second, when you do negotiate, anchor to current data instead of vibes. Average hourly earnings just hit $37.53. Levels.fyi, Glassdoor, and BLS Occupational Employment data give you role-specific and metro-specific numbers.

Walk into a comp conversation with a line like this:

You are not being difficult. You are speaking the same language the company's own comp tools speak.

Teen and entry-level unemployment is running far hotter than the headline rate, with the teenage unemployment rate at 14.7% in May. Professional and business services, where a lot of new grads land, added almost nothing. Entry-level is the part of the market getting squeezed hardest, partly by AI absorbing the tasks that used to be junior people's first jobs.

So stop applying like it is 2019. Mass-applying to 200 "entry-level" postings that each get 1,000 applicants is a losing math problem. Instead, go where the human is. Find the actual hiring manager or team lead on LinkedIn, send a short specific note referencing something real about their work, and attach proof you can do the job (a small project, a teardown, a sample) rather than just a resume that an algorithm will rank against 999 others.

The candidates winning entry-level roles in 2026 are the ones who show up as a person with evidence, not a PDF in a pile.

Most retail investors will hear about this after it's too late. Discover the verified signals Wall Street is watching and the access paths most people don't know exist.

Download now

Recruiters are reading the same report you are, and most candidates will either ignore it or use it to feel discouraged. You can use it to sound like the sharpest person in the pipeline.

When a recruiter or hiring manager asks why you are looking, or makes small talk about the market, try a version of this:

That single answer signals three things at once: you understand the economy, you did your homework on their company, and you are making a deliberate choice rather than fleeing a sinking ship. It reframes you from "person who needs a job" to "person who chose this team on purpose." In a noisy market, that framing is worth more than another line on your resume.

If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.

Subscribe right here. It’s totally free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond.