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nice writeup! looking forward to doing some more training as soon as i get some more data sorted. it'll be a custom arch, but i'll probably shoehorn it into unsloth for a speed boost.
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Quick question, for average joe do we still need to "train" LLM or we can just use off the shelf model and use it ("inference"?) for normal use cases like business process augmentation (e.g. helping read paper receipts, or generate cat videos)?
You can use modern off-the-shelf models for those types of tasks, however a smaller-but-bespoke model will usually be more cost-efficient if used at scale.
Modern smaller LLMs like Qwen3.6 27B is quite good at visual tasks like describing images. I wouldn't trust it on receipts unless you're fine with a bit less than 100% accuracy, say 90-ish%. For descriptions of images and such I've found they do quite well indeed. A key change was the introduction of more or even dynamic visual tokens, that really helped the model "see" more details.

Generating cat videos is the domain of diffusion models. If you have at least a 16GB GPU and a fair bit of patience you can get quite good results, check out ComfyUI reddit for example.

I think nowadays a lot of models are trained more at doing this than at knowing things, while being smaller. So I’d say yes!

At least that’s my impression.