This is a cool example of how less can be more. The article is also surprisingly informative for a post of these characteristics.

Metadata

Highlights

In a six week sprint, we set out to see how far a small, open-weight language model could be pushed using lightweight tools and without massive infrastructure. By combining retrieval-augmented generation, reasoning trace fine-tuning, and budget forcing at inference time, our 3B model achieved near-frontier reasoning performance on real-world health queries – and is small enough to run locally on a laptop. We’re open-sourcing everything, and we believe this approach has enormous potential for public sector and compute-constrained environments.