The model that didn't exist, so you made it yourself

Last week, I wanted a small version of the prompt rewriter that ships with Qwen-Image 2.1. The official one is a 9B model that needs about 20 GB of memory and thinks for thousands of tokens before writing a single paragraph. On the Hub, I found only compressed copies of that same 9B model. So I described what I wanted to ML Intern, and the next day I had a 0.8B version that runs on a CPU. It returns valid output 99.7% of the time and uses about a quarter of the teacher's tokens. The compute for the whole project, including having the 9B model label 8,797 example requests, came to USD 16.

Over the course of the next few days, I made five more models the same way. Each one started as a message in HuggingChat with ML-intern switched on, and each one ended as a public model on the Hub with its evaluation in the model card. ML-intern plans the work, asks me for a budget before it spends anything, runs a small test before the real job, then trains, evaluates and publishes on Hugging Face hardware.

How I prompt ML Intern

The first message is where I spend my effort. My first prompt, for the citrus model shared below, was about 450 words. By my 6th project it was closer to 2,000, because each project taught me something I wanted in the next one. All seven prompts are on GitHub at yvrjsharma/ml-intern-prompts, exactly as I wrote them.

A prompt starts with the idea in one line and why I want it. Then it names the exact pieces: the dataset, the base model, the training script. Anything I have already checked goes under a heading that literally says "Verified facts, do not re-derive", so the agent spends its budget on the work instead of rediscovering what I know. For the camera-angle LoRA that section listed which trainer had just added transparent-image support, and which open GitHub issues made the fallback trainer risky.

1. A model that knows your field

Check out: Model · Dataset · Citrus Doctor App