Cortex Training: Serverless Fine-Tuning for Open-Weight LLMs

Every production AI application generates millions of valuable data points about your business, including customer preferences, usage patterns and outcomes, but most enterprises never take advantage of it. Many default to building agents on closed foundation models that can be costly and lack the detailed understanding of your business. As open-weight models become increasingly competitive with frontier models, enterprises have an opportunity to customize AI using their own data and context. Doing so, however, has traditionally required managing complex, expensive GPU infrastructure or relying on managed APIs that offer limited flexibility and control. Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of Cortex Training, Snowflake’s serverless offering for customizing and deploying open-weight LLMs. With Cortex Training, teams can use familiar training frameworks, or build advanced custom training loops with low-level serverless APIs — all without managing the complexities of GPU provisioning, scheduling, checkpointing and distributed execution. Cortex Training is built on top of a highly customizable and optimized open source backend to bring the flexibility and efficiency of a complex, self-managed bare-metal training cluster to a simplified serverless experience. Benchmarks show up to 61% lower cost than competing…