Learn
Practical guides to fine-tuning, distillation, and deploying small language models.
Full Fine-Tuning vs Adapters
Full fine-tuning rewrites every weight; adapters leave the base frozen and train a small add-on. Here is what counts as an adapter and where the two approaches genuinely diverge.
FunctionGemma 270M for Multi-Turn Tool Calling
Google's FunctionGemma scores 9.9-38.8% on multi-turn tool calling before training and 90.9-96.7% after, and the gap between those two numbers is the whole story of using a 270M function caller.
Gemma 3 270M: What It Can Do
The capability envelope of Google's 270M-parameter Gemma 3: which tasks it clears after fine-tuning, which it can't reach at any training budget, and why its benchmark variance is so wide.
Gemma 4 E2B and E4B Explained
The E in Gemma 4 E2B and E4B stands for effective parameters, which is smaller than the total, and that changes memory planning, download size, and how you pick between the two.
Hidden Costs of Running Your Own Models
The line items that never appear in a per-token comparison: idle GPU time, serving expertise, monitoring, retraining cadence, and the security work that self-hosting moves onto your side of the ledger.
Latency as a Cost
Treating response time as a line item rather than a quality metric, using measured brain-stage latencies from a voice assistant where a 0.6B student answered in ~40ms against a ~700ms cloud median.
Liquid LFM2.5 350M for Tool Calling
Liquid AI's LFM2.5-350M reaches 96-98% tool call equivalence after fine-tuning on three multi-turn benchmarks, matching a 120B teacher. Here's the data, the architecture behind it, and where the model still fails.
Multi-Turn Tool Calling Explained
Multi-turn tool calling trains a model to emit the next function call given a whole conversation, not a single request: the data format, the turn-expansion setting, and why per-call accuracy compounds.
Qwen3 1.7B Fine-Tuning Guide
Specs, benchmark rank, failure modes, and configuration for fine-tuning Qwen3-1.7B, the default recommendation in the distil labs catalog when you have no reason to pick anything else.