Darke Technology

If you love fine-tuning open-source models (like me), then listen. > Start with 1B, 2B, 4B, and 8B models. (Don't start with a 27B model or bigger at first.) > Use WebGPU providers. I use Google Colab Pro for any model smaller than 9B. A single A100 80GB costs around $0.60/hr, which is cheap. Enough for small models. > Don’t buy GPUs unless you fine-tune 7 to 10 models. You'll understand the nitty-gritty in the process. > Use Codex 5.5 × DeepSeek v4 Pro to create datasets. Codex to plan, DeepSeek v4 Pro to generate rows. > Use Unsloth's instruct models as a base from Hugging Face. Yes, there are others too, but Unsloth also provides fast fine-tuning notebooks. > Use Unsloth's fine-tuning notebooks as a reference. Paste them into Codex, and Codex will write a custom notebook with the configs you need. > Spend 1 day learning about: - SFT (supervised fine-tuning) - RL training (GRPO, DPO, PPO, etc.) - LoRA / QLoRA training - Quantization and types - Local inference engines (llama.cpp) - KV cache and prompt cache > Just get started. Claude, Codex, and ChatGPT can design a step-by-step plan for how you can fine-tune your first AI model. Future tech is moving toward small 5B to 15B ELMs (Expert Language Models) rather than general 1T LLMs. So fine-tuning is an important skill that anyone can acquire today. Tune models, test them, use them. Then fine-tune for companies and make a career out of it. (Companies pay $50k+ to fine-tune models on their data so they can get personalized AI models.) Shoot your questions below. I'll be sharing in-depth raw findings about this topic in the coming days.

LLM Knowledge Bases Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it. So: Data ingest: I index source documents (articles, papers, repos, datasets, images, etc.) into a raw/ directory, then I use an LLM to incrementally "compile" a wiki, which is just a collection of .md files in a directory structure. The wiki includes summaries of all the data in raw/, backlinks, and then it categorizes data into concepts, writes articles for them, and links them all. To convert web articles into .md files I like to use the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, and then I also use a hotkey to download all the related images to local so that my LLM can easily reference them. IDE: I use Obsidian as the IDE "frontend" where I can view the raw data, the the compiled wiki, and the derived visualizations. Important to note that the LLM writes and maintains all of the data of the wiki, I rarely touch it directly. I've played with a few Obsidian plugins to render and view data in other ways (e.g. Marp for slides). Q&A: Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough (e.g. mine on some recent research is ~100 articles and ~400K words), you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc. I thought I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good about auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all the documents and it reads all the important related data fairly easily at this ~small scale. Output: Instead of getting answers in text/terminal, I like to have it render markdown files for me, or slide shows (Marp format), or matplotlib images, all of which I then view again in Obsidian. You can imagine many other visual output formats depending on the query. Often, I end up "filing" the outputs back into the wiki to enhance it for further queries. So my own explorations and queries always "add up" in the knowledge base. Linting: I've run some LLM "health checks" over the wiki to e.g. find inconsistent data, impute missing data (with web searchers), find interesting connections for new article candidates, etc., to incrementally clean up the wiki and enhance its overall data integrity. The LLMs are quite good at suggesting further questions to ask and look into. Extra tools: I find myself developing additional tools to process the data, e.g. I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki, which I both use directly (in a web ui), but more often I want to hand it off to an LLM via CLI as a tool for larger queries. Further explorations: As the repo grows, the natural desire is to also think about synthetic data generation + finetuning to have your LLM "know" the data in its weights instead of just context windows. TLDR: raw data from a given number of sources is collected, then compiled by an LLM into a .md wiki, then operated on by various CLIs by the LLM to do Q&A and to incrementally enhance the wiki, and all of it viewable in Obsidian. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually, it's the domain of the LLM. I think there is room here for an incredible new product instead of a hacky collection of scripts.

Apple's M4 chip engineers earn $450k+ Intel's CPU architects earn $400k+ NVIDIA's hardware engineers power every AI model on the planet They all understand one thing almost no software dev ever studies: How a computer actually works at the hardware level "ETH Zurich – Digital Design & Computer Architecture" by Onur Mutlu Free on YouTube. 30+ full lectures. Spring 2023 By a professor who holds joint appointments at both ETH Zurich and Carnegie Mellon Starts from a single transistor. Ends with a complete CPU you understand entirely: • Logic gates – how electricity becomes computation at the most fundamental level • Instruction Set Architecture – the contract between software and hardware every dev ignores • Pipelining – how your CPU executes multiple instructions simultaneously without you knowing • Out-of-order execution – why your CPU secretly reorders your code to run faster • Memory hierarchy – the design decision that determines the speed of every program ever written Every line of code you've ever written ran on hardware you don't understand The engineers who built that hardware earn $450k Now you know where to start