A smaller speech model earns its place on the iPhone
Aidana transcribed the 47 matched clips 3.35 times faster, with observed English WER of 2.15% and Spanish WER of 5.37%.
Small
machines.
Big questions.
I’m Vlad. I build, break, and benchmark local AI. Here are the experiments, the findings, and the lessons.
Explore the journal
Fresh from the workbench
All experimentsA coding agent that knows when to ask for help
Three live recovery scenarios passed, each finishing with 10/10 checks.
When the retention gate says stop
All three registered learning rates crossed the retention floor after eight steps and rolled back.
From the measurementsMore parameters.
More parameters.
More useful?
Sometimes the smaller model is the better fit. I compare the speed, memory, and quality before deciding what stays on the machine.
Read the embedding experimentThe smaller encoder moved more documents
275 documents · batch size 32 · AWQ W4A16
- 1B · native 2048d1,003.8
- 8B · native 4096d181.0
documents / second
Amortized throughput on this corpus, not single-query latency.
View data & source
| Configuration | Value |
|---|---|
| 1B · native 2048d | 1,003.8 |
| 8B · native 4096d | 181.0 |
Origin: structured measurements. Revision 6550ead3945b.
The open notebook
44 stories · 7 areasCorrective data meets a fresh gameplay gate
On Ubuntu CPU, the corrected policy passed 10/10 full-kitchen trials against a same-host retraining control at 7/10.
6 min readA second dish, a new frozen test
The corrected candidate passed 10/10 paired two-dish trials against a frozen baseline at 0/10.
6 min readEight clears are still not a promotion
The v3 protocol measured 8/10 full-stage clears versus 0/10 for its paired baseline; the strict gate rejected it.
6 min readLearning to play from pixels
The first-dish baseline produced six successful recorded evaluations across five starting positions, with exact replay.
4 min readThe reusable RGBA learning pipeline
Owned frames, bounded controls, saved state, teacher-data export and exact replay form one auditable pipeline.
9 min read