A model of 449 numbers, trained in under a second, can be all your one task needs.
A2 · Training Your Own Small Model
Frontier models are general. Your problem is not, and that gap is your advantage. This chapter takes one narrow question, does the label work honestly, and trains a model small enough to read in a text file. You will overfit on purpose to see the shape of it, fix it three different ways, borrow a model trained for something else, let a big model teach a small one, and squeeze the weights down to eight bits. It ends by comparing your model with a giant the way an honest person would, cost included.
- A Task Worth a Small Model
- A Few Hundred Labels
- The Number You Have to Beat
- Training a Tiny Classifier
- Overfit on Purpose
- Three Ways to Fix It
- A Language Model You Can Read
- Fine-Tune or Start From Scratch
- LoRA, by Picture
- Letting the Giant Teach
- Shrinking It to Ship
- Judging It Against the Giant