Practical answers for technical buyers; validate resale, SLA, and capacity wording with legal and sales before public launch and paid campaigns.
What is the difference between a custom SLM and fine-tuning a public model?+
Fine-tuning adapts weights (or adapters) on top of an existing checkpoint. A custom SLM engagement usually includes that adaptation plus explicit work on data curation, evaluation gates, and compression so the resulting model meets latency, cost, and residency targets - not only a new LoRA on top of a generic API.
How do you handle sensitive or regulated data?+
We align on where data may live, who can access it, retention limits, and audit expectations before training starts. Work typically stays in environments your security team approves; exact controls are documented in the statement of work. Nothing on this page replaces your legal or DPA process.
Which compression techniques do you use?+
Common options include knowledge distillation from a larger teacher, post-training quantization, structured or unstructured pruning where metrics allow, and smaller architectures when re-training from scratch is justified. The mix depends on your accuracy floor and serving hardware - we do not apply a fixed recipe to every client.
How long does a first delivery usually take?+
Timelines depend on data readiness, evaluation complexity, and infra access. Indicative ranges are summarized on the About page; every schedule is confirmed after discovery. This site does not quote fixed durations.
What do we need to provide from our side?+
A product or use-case owner, access to representative data (or agreement on how to collect it), someone who can approve governance decisions, and inference owners who will run or integrate the model. Optional: existing MLOps hooks for CI and promotion.
Can you integrate with our existing MLOps stack?+
Yes, when it reduces friction for your teams. We document how artifacts map to your registries, containers, and deployment pipelines rather than forcing a greenfield toolchain.
What happens after a proof of concept?+
If metrics meet the agreed gate, we plan production hardening: monitoring, versioning, rollback, and optional scale-out. If not, we document gaps and options - smaller scope, different data, or a different architectural path such as private LLM first.