Wow, Sebastian Raschk's blog articles are jewels - much appreciated.

I use the get-oss and qwen3 models a lot (smaller models locally using Ollama and LM Studio) and commercial APIs for the full size models.

For local model use, I get very good results with get-oss when I "over prompt," that is, I specify a larger amount of context information than I usually do. Qwen3 is simply awesome.

Until about three years ago, I have always understood neural network models (starting in the 1980s), GAN, Recurrent, LSTM, etc. well enough to write implementations. I really miss the feeling that I could develop at least simpler LLMs on my own. I am slowly working through Sebastian Raschk's excellent book https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-large-language-model-f... but I will probably never finish it (to be honest).