Berlin Builder Circle #3: Small Models in Production

Small models are moving from demos into production. Teams post-train them to replace the frontier-model calls their agents make thousands of times a day, and ship them on-device for privacy, offline use and cost. The hard parts rarely make it into talks: when it's worth it, which data and evals you can trust, what breaks after launch, and how runtimes and hardware behave on real devices. Berlin Builder Circle #3 is a small, closed-door session for practitioners working on exactly that. It follows our Small Language Models Night in October: the talks raised the questions, and this is where builders dig into them. No talks, no slides, no vendor pitches. Everyone contributes. What we'll cover When a post-trained small model beats prompting a frontier model, and when it doesn't Finding the step worth replacing in your production traces Synthetic data, evals, and keeping quality up after launch On-device runtimes, hardware limits, and shipping model updates The questions you send in when you apply Agenda 18:00 Doors, food and drinks 18:20 Welcome from the hosts and Rasa 18:30 Round-robin: what you've shipped, where you're stuck, what you want from the room (2 minutes each) 19:15 Short break 19:25 Guided discussion, part 1: when is a small model worth it? 19:55 Guided discussion, part 2: shipping on-device 20:20 Wrap-up 20:30 Close Who should apply Engineers, researchers and technical leads who have post-trained, served or shipped small or fine-tuned models in production, or are building one for real users right now. Mobile and edge developers shipping AI on-device are very welcome. Entry requirement: you've worked on the topic yourself. If you're not actively building in this space, this probably isn't the right room; our public AAIF Berlin meetups are open to everyone. About 20 seats. We read every application and approve on a rolling basis until Friday 6 November. Please be specific about what you're building: it's how we put the room together and choose the discussion