How to choose the right open model for production

What this post added

This post provides guidance on selecting open-source LLMs for production workloads. It outlines the benefits of open models (transparency, adaptability, control), legal considerations (licensing, origin), and offers a framework for comparing models based on parameter size and capability tiers (low, medium, high). It details trade-offs between cost, speed, and quality, providing example configurations. The post emphasizes the importance of rigorous evaluation using metrics, a golden dataset, and techniques like LLM-as-a-judge, with a step-by-step process for manual review and prompt modification. It also highlights the role of fine-tuning (LoRA SFT, DPO) for task-specific adaptation.