What if you could take a pre-built AI brain, teach it to think out loud, and make it dramatically smarter at a specific task, all on your own laptop? I take SmolLM2, train it to perform unit conversions, and go from 0% to 72% accuracy using Chain-of-Thought prompting, LoRA fine-tuning, and Rejection Fine-Tuning.
Patch tokenization, BSQ quantization, a causal transformer, and arithmetic coding — built from the ground up. Here's what broke, what worked, and where this research is headed.