silvermete0r/nano-slms-for-local-function-calling-assistance

The project is in its absolute infancy (1 day old, 0 stars) and addresses a highly competitive niche: making tiny models (sub-1B) smart enough for tool-use. While there is a valid use case for sub-1B models in edge/IoT devices, the defensibility is currently minimal as it relies on standard fine-tuning recipes. Major players like Alibaba (Qwen-0.5B/1.5B) and Microsoft (Phi-3-mini) are already releasing 'instruct' versions of their smallest models that handle function calling reasonably well. Furthermore, OS-level integration of small language models (Apple Intelligence, Gemini Nano on Android) creates a high platform domination risk, as the OS providers will likely provide the optimized inference engine and agentic capabilities for these tiny models directly. Without a proprietary high-quality synthetic dataset for function calling or a breakthrough in architectural efficiency, this project remains a replicable experiment.