Amit Bahree

Amit Bahree is a Principal TPM at Microsoft, where he is part of the engineering team building the next generation of AI products and services for millions of customers using the Azure AI platform. He is also responsible for custom engineering across the platform with key customers, solving complex enterprise scenarios using all forms of AI, including generative AI.

A simple geek at heart, Amit has nearly 30 years of experience in technology and product development. He has a strong background in applied research, machine learning, AI, and cloud platforms. He is passionate about creating potent and responsible AI products that transform industries and improve lives.

Amit resides in the Seattle area with his wife, daughter, and the sweetest dog, who is not spoilt rotten.

books by Amit Bahree

LLM Customization and Fine-Tuning

  • MEAP began July 2026
  • Last updated July 2026
  • Publication in Fall 2026 (estimated)
  • ISBN 9781633433908
  • 350 pages (estimated)
  • printed in black & white

LLM Customization and Fine-Tuning is a hands-on playbook for turning a general-purpose open-weights model into a focused, cost-efficient system that’s tailored to your business. You’ll explore the complete adaptation spectrum, from prompting and RAG, through LoRA and QLoRA, to fully supervised fine-tuning, knowledge distillation, and preference alignment with DPO. One running example, a fictitious enterprise and its IT help desk, carries through every chapter, so you see the same problem solved at each step and can compare the techniques head to head. You’ll soon be swapping generic LLMs for ones that know your business, respect your budget, run on your infrastructure, and stay reliable in production!

Everything you learn is fully reproducible on cost-effective and easy-to-access hardware. You’ll train LoRA and QLoRA adapters on a modest consumer card and perform full fine-tuning on a single 24 GB card such as an A30 or RTX 4090. The published numbers in the book match what you’ll see on your own machine, within run-to-run variance. All with no requirement for a datacenter. The book is also honest about the tradeoffs: it shows you where a technique doesn't win, and it publishes all the code, the trained models, and the training and evaluation logs, including the runs that didn't work, so you can verify every result yourself.

As you go, you’ll build a decision framework that weighs cost, latency, privacy, and ROI to choose the right technique for each problem. You’ll construct a training-data pipeline that curates real data, generates teacher-model outputs, and tracks lineage. You’ll distill a smaller, cheaper student from a stronger teacher, and align a model with DPO while running safety regressions at every step. And because most fine-tuned models fail not at launch but months later, you’ll implement the operational layer that other LLM books skip entirely: a model and data registry, TF-IDF drift detection with canary prompts, rollback procedures, a red-team safety monitor, and an outcome-based retraining cadence.

The methods you learn in this book scale unchanged from Qwen3-4B on your workstation to frontier models on a cluster. You’ll build your own intuition around training AI, own your own pipeline, and make build-versus-buy decisions with real numbers.

Generative AI in Action

  • September 2024
  • ISBN 9781633436947
  • 464 pages
  • printed in black & white

Generative AI in Action presents concrete examples, insights, and techniques for using LLMs and other modern AI technologies successfully and safely. In it, you’ll find practical approaches for incorporating AI into marketing, software development, business report generation, data storytelling, and other typically-human tasks. You’ll explore the emerging patterns for GenAI apps, master best practices for prompt engineering, and learn how to address hallucination, high operating costs, the rapid pace of change and other common problems.