We benchmarked 15 small language models across 9 tasks to find which one you should actually fine-tune. Here are the results.

r/LocalLLaMA
Machine Learning Generative AI Open Source AI AI Research

There are a lot of SLM options right now and picking the right base model for fine-tuning is a real decision. Qwen3, Llama 3.2, Gemma 3, SmolLM2, Liquid AI's LFM2 - each family has multiple size variants and it's hard to know which one will actually respond best to your