Comment by thot_experiment

NTA but almost certainly, the advantage is that Qwen3.5 is extremely generic already so adapting it to a specific task is way easier than training a NN from scratch. It's probably akin to how OCR is now just something I use Qwen for even though I have access to dedicated OCR tools, Qwen is good enough and it's already in my vram. Modern VLLMs are pretty great at answering basic questions about an image by default and I'm guessing finetuning takes them from "pretty good" to "good enough to use in production".