I Took a 397MB Model and Turned It Into a Customer Service Chatbot That Actually Works

Part 2 of my “tiny models, big surprises” series. This time I stopped just running them and started shaping them. A few weeks ago I wrote about running TinyLlama on my MacBook Air and being quietly stunned that a 637MB model could write working code. A lot of you wrote back asking the same question: “Cool, but can you actually use these for real work?” That question lived in my head for two weeks. So I went looking for an answer. This post is what happened when I picked an even smaller model, fine-tuned it on real customer data, and dropped it into a real company workflow as a chatbot.