Okay, so specialized decision models are becoming the rage.
Bespoke Labs just released Nimble, an open 9B decision model built from Qwen3.5-9B.
And apparently they built it in ONE DAY.
The recipe:
đ§ Qwen3.5-9B
đ¯ LoRA fine-tune
đ only 2,676 training examples
â no Jev distillation
â no RL
â open model
â open data
â open training recipe
Instead of generating explanations or JSON, Nimble scores the allowed answers:
YES / NO â A / B / C â route 1 / 2 / 3 â severity 1â5
Then returns the choice + probabilities.
Example of Bespoke's 324-example held-out test:
Qwen3.5-9B â 66.36%
Qwen3.8-27B â 84.88%
đĨ Nimble-9B â 90.12%
Jev â 93.21%
And because it isn't generating a bunch of tokens:
⥠~106 ms median on H100
đ ~444 ms median on an M5 Pro 64GB đ đ
đ¯ So this is the key, giant reasoning model doesn't need to answer every tiny agent decision.
Let the big model think, then let a small local model handle the ...
đ ī¸ tool selection
đ§ routing
â verification
đ¨ policy decisions
đ scoring
đ retry / stop
Fast. Local. No API call.
â ī¸ Bespoke says this is a narrow synthetic 324-example evaluation, NOT a standardized System One benchmark.
đ GH: /bespokelabsai/nimble