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:
๐ง Qwen3.5-9B
๐ฏ LoRA fine-tune
๐ only 2,676 training examples
โ no Jev distillation
โ no RL
โ open model
โ open data
โ open training recipe
Instead of generating explanations or JSON, Nimble scores the allowed answers:
YES / NO โ A / B / C โ route 1 / 2 / 3 โ severity 1โ5
Then returns the choice + probabilities.
Example of Bespoke's 324-example held-out test:
Qwen3.5-9B โ 66.36%
Qwen3.8-27B โ 84.88%
๐ฅ Nimble-9B โ 90.12%
Jev โ 93.21%
And because it isn't generating a bunch of tokens:
โก ~106 ms median on H100
๐ ~444 ms median on an M5 Pro 64GB ๐ ๐
๐ฏ 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 ...
๐ ๏ธ tool selection
๐งญ routing
โ verification
๐จ policy decisions
๐ scoring
๐ retry / stop
Fast. Local. No API call.
โ ๏ธ Bespoke says this is a narrow synthetic 324-example evaluation, NOT a standardized System One benchmark.
๐ GH: /bespokelabsai/nimble