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Showing posts from July, 2025

Train Your Own Dragon: How to Customize a Small Language Model for Your Domain

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Why Smaller, Smarter AI Wins Imagine hiring a super-intelligent intern. They know a little bit about everything, from astrophysics to Italian cooking, but they don’t really understand your business. Now picture a focused, trained assistant who speaks your industry’s language, understands your customers, and knows how to get things done fast. That’s the difference between a generic AI model and a customized Small Language Model (SLM). SLMs are fast, efficient AI assistants you can train to specialize in your domain, whether that’s healthcare, retail, law, or anything else. In this visual guide, we’ll walk through how to customize your own SLM to turn it into a reliable expert. No jargon. No programming required. Just ideas, images, and simple steps. What Is a Small Language Model (SLM)? Think of a Small Language Model (SLM) as a compact, highly capable assistant that understands language, answers questions, and helps you automat...

From Prompts to Protocols: Benchmarking Multi-Agent AI Frameworks

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As large language models (LLMs) become more powerful and versatile, the focus is rapidly shifting from single-model prompting to cooperative multi-agent workflows. These frameworks enable agents to communicate, delegate tasks, and complete complex objectives in a structured and scalable manner. In this post, I benchmark three leading orchestration frameworks: CrewAI , MetaGPT , and LangGraph . Each is tested with three open-source models from Ollama : LLaMA 3 , Mistral , and Phi-3 . The goal is to evaluate how well each framework handles real-world task orchestration using a consistent and meaningful use case. Whether you're a developer building intelligent assistants or an architect evaluating agent frameworks for production, this post will help you compare the tradeoffs clearly and practically. Benchmark Use Case: Report Generation via Agents To keep the evaluation realistic and reproducible, I used a single well-defined task across all frameworks: Produce a list of se...

Contextual Positioning of Intelligent Agent Protocols: Understanding Where Each Protocol Fits and Why It Matters

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Introduction As AI agents become more capable and interconnected, the protocols that govern their communication, tool use, and collaboration are becoming critical to their effectiveness. These intelligent agent protocols serve as the behavioral logic that ensures agents can reason, act, and interact in a structured, scalable, and secure way. But not all protocols serve the same purpose. Some focus on tool invocation. Others enable inter-agent coordination. A few provide system-level safeguards. In this post, we will map out the most influential intelligent agent protocols emerging in 2025 and show how each fits into the broader architecture of multi-agent systems. By understanding their contextual positioning, you can make better decisions when building or adopting agentic infrastructure. What Are Intelligent Agent Protocols? At a high level, an intelligent agent protocol defines the structure and rules of communication and interaction for AI agents. These protocols handle ever...

How Self-Attention Powers Large Language Models

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How Self-Attention Powers Large Language Models When you interact with ChatGPT or similar AI systems, it often feels like the model understands your entire sentence or paragraph all at once. This is not a coincidence. The underlying reason is a mechanism called self-attention , which sits at the heart of transformer-based models. Self-attention gives large language models their ability to reason across long sequences, disambiguate meaning, and respond coherently. Without it, models would struggle to handle tasks like translation, summarization, question answering, or conversation. What Is Self-Attention Doing Self-attention is a method for learning relationships between words in a sequence by assigning weights based on how important each word is to another. Rather than looking only at nearby words like RNNs or CNNs, self-attention allows each word to consider all the words in the input regardless of their position. For example, in the sentence The key...

What Are Transformer Blocks in LLMs?

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At the core of modern large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and LLaMA is a powerful neural architecture known as the Transformer. Introduced by Vaswani et al. in the 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need , the Transformer architecture fundamentally changed the landscape of natural language processing by enabling models to learn dependencies between words across entire sequences, without relying on recurrence or convolution. A Transformer block is the fundamental building unit of an LLM. It is a modular layer that processes token embeddings through a combination of core components: Multi-head self-attention , which allows the model to focus on relevant parts of the input sequence when interpreting each token. Feed-forward networks (FFNs) , which apply learned transformations to each token representation independently. Residual connections , which help preserve useful information and improve gradient flow during training. ...