nowfound

Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Distilled 0.6B text-to-SQL model

We used our platform to fine-tune a tiny text-to-SQL model using distillation from DeepSeek V3. Repo has instructions for how to replicate this. This is definitely not the best-performing model like this out there! But I found it surprising we were able to get to this much out of it: stone's throw away from a teacher 1000x the size! We also ran the same thing using the 4B Qwen and matched the teacher accuracy, though here the difference is merely 100x :) I find this pretty cool - obviously our distilled models can only do this one task and don't generalize, but that's often exactly what you…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    We recently used DeepSeek V4 Flash as a teacher for finance tasks with GPT-OSS-120B. Distillation works well on this problem. At a constrained 8k token budget, our self-distilled 120B scores 83.61% on FinanceReasoning, above Kimi K3 (81.93%) and Inkling (65.13%). We released the 20B open weights. With V4 as the teacher though, we realized it would be timely to measure if the censorship characteristic of it transferred to the distilled version of the base model. tl;dr it didn't, the teacher answered politically sensitive questions 7 SDs differently than expected, but the distilled model's…

    Jul 2026 · ctgt.ai · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Would love thoughts! Here is the HF page: https://huggingface.co/chatdb/natural-sql-7b

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Long story short: We (Dataherald) just open-sourced our entire codebase, including the core engine, the clients that interact with it and the backend application layer for authentication and RBAC. You can now use the full solution to build text-to-SQL into your product. The Problem: modern LLMs write syntactically correct SQL, but they struggle with real-world relational data. This is because real world data and schema is messy, natural language can often be ambiguous and LLMs are not trained on your specific dataset. Solution: The core NL-to-SQL engine in Dataherald is an LLM based agent…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    The text-based SQL learning game for data scientists and marketers

    2023 · lost-at-sql.therobinlord.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    I previously posted this a month and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876742 I have rewritten it to be much more simple, from 951 lines of code to just 364, with no loss in core functionality or generation quality. I also added a tiny GPT implementation as a comparison (inspired by Andrej Karpathy's code). The two model implementations are ~80% identical, with the core differences being the generate and get_batch functions. The model architecture, training loop, etc, differ in only 19 lines of code. Trained weights are included, so you can just clone and run…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    We developed a new framework that enables flexible control of generated text in language models. By combining several models and/or system prompts in one mathematical formula, it lets you tweak your style and combine model outputs with ease. A handy tool for those working with LLMs, looking for more fine-grained control of stylistic output. More details in our paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.14479. Feedback and potential applications are welcome.

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Using SQL's Turing Completeness to Build Tetris. Contribute to nuno-faria/tetris-sql development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    A repository that contains models, datasets, and fine-tuning techniques for DB-GPT, with the purpose of enhancing model performance in Text-to-SQL - eosphoros-ai/DB-GPT-Hub

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hi HN community. We are excited to open source Dataherald’s natural-language-to-SQL engine today (https://github.com/Dataherald/dataherald). This engine allows you to set up an API from your structured database that can answer questions in plain English. GPT-4 class LLMs have gotten remarkably good at writing SQL. However, out-of-the-box LLMs and existing frameworks would not work with our own structured data at a necessary quality level. For example, given the question “what was the average rent in Los Angeles in May 2023?” a reasonable human would either assume the…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10NL

    Hi HN- Today, we are releasing the hosted API for our natural language to SQL engine, which allows you to: (1) Explain Your Data: Feed in dictionaries, dbt, schemas, Confluence docs - we'll understand the business context to your data. (2) Train Your AI: Fine-tune an LLM (including GPT-4) specifically for your data, increasing accuracy and lowering latency (3) Trust the Answer: See confidence scores with each AI-generated query, stay in control. (4) Conduct complex SQL queries Problem background - Developers struggle to build NL-to-SQL into products because LLMs do not work out-of-the-box;…

    2024 · dataherald.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Two weeks ago I was on my babymoon in Corfu, Greece. While in transit, I was overseeing a GSoC intern submit an important feature to my array database library, Xarray-SQL. He added `to_dataset()`, which completed the roundtrip between thinking of array data in a tabular model simultaneously as gridded rasters (the premise of the project is that every Nd array can be mapped to 2d, where orthogonal dims of the Nd array are just primary keys of a tabular representation). We discussed in chat, now that this feature existed, what demos could we make that would prove this data model works? With…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hi HN, We're Luke and Phillip, and we're building Spice.ai OSS - a lightweight, portable runtime, built in Rust and powered by Apache DataFusion to locally materialize, accelerate, and query data tables sourced from any database, data warehouse or data lake. Phillip and I first introduced Spice on Show HN in September 2021. Since then, we’ve been schooled and humbled in every way building 100TB+ data and ML systems for the https://spice.ai cloud platform. Along with our customers, we struggled with getting fast, low-latency, high-concurrency SQL query within a budget, accessing and…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hey HN! We’re building FinetuneDB (https://finetunedb.com/), an LLM fine-tuning platform. It enables teams to easily create and manage high-quality datasets, and streamlines the entire workflow from fine-tuning to serving and evaluating models with domain experts. You can check out our docs here: (https://docs.finetunedb.com/) FinetuneDB exists because creating and managing high-quality datasets is a real bottleneck when fine-tuning LLMs. The quality of your data directly impacts the performance of your fine-tuned models, and existing tools didn’t offer an easy…

    2024 · finetunedb.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Fine-tune LLMs from one YAML. Layer streaming trains an 8B model on a 4 GB laptop GPU. - MakazhanAlpamys/Soup

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Embed NL-to-SQL into your product

    2024 · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    I am excited to announce the release of TabPFN v2, a tabular foundation model that delivers state-of-the-art predictions on small datasets in just 2.8 seconds for classification and 4.8 seconds for regression compared to strong baselines tuned for 4 hours. Published in Nature, this model outperforms traditional methods on datasets with up to 10,000 samples and 500 features. The model is available under an open license: a derivative of the Apache 2 license with a single modification, adding an enhanced attribution requirement inspired by the Llama 3 license:…

    2025 · nature.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Do you know that Small Language Models (SLM) can outperform LLMs if trained (fine-tuned) on domain specific datasets, like your companies knowledge base? The issue: fine-tuning a SLM usually requires a dataset of 10k - 100k records, which is huge. I created a platform for applying "human in the loop" augmentation techniques on your small dataset, so that you can start with maybe 100 records and build-up quickly huge datasets and launch a training without prior knowledge. I implemented 2 techniques, based on LLM distillation, however: more to come. HN, what Do you think? Do you see value in…

    2025 · tunetrain.ai · its alternatives →

  18. 18DS

    I played around with GPT-3 to build this demo. Select a public BigQuery dataset and describe your query in natural English, then edit the generated SQL as needed and execute it. https://app.tabbydata.com/sql-assistant-demo

    2021 · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    It's our new text-to-image model: a 9.3B single-stream diffusion transformer trained entirely from scratch. We focused heavily on controllability through structured JSON prompts, with strong text rendering, spatial awareness through bounding box guidance, and color palette control. It has the best text rendering of any open-weight model we've tested so far, and the NF4 quantized checkpoint runs on a single 24GB GPU. For more technical details and examples see our blog post: https://ideogram.ai/blog/ideogram-4.0/ We will be happy to answer any questions :)

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    I've always been curious about how SQL engines actually work. So I built a minimum viable SQL engine in Go. - Supports CSV files as tables - Supports SELECT, FROM, WHERE, LIMIT It's very simple: 1. Parses query string 2. Converts it into an AST representation 3. Executes the query against the CSV 4. Returns the results

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    I am excited to announce the release of TabPFN-2.5, our tabular foundation model that now scales to datasets of up to 50,000 samples and 2,000 features - a 5x increase from TabPFN v2, published in the Nature journal earlier this year. TabPFN-2.5 delivers state-of-the-art predictions in one forward pass without hyperparameter tuning across classification and regression tasks. What’s new in 2.5: TabPFN-2.5 maintains the core approach of v2 - a pretrained transformer trained on more than hundred million synthetic datasets to perform in-context learning and output a predictive distribution for…

    Nov 2025 · priorlabs.ai · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Over the past few months, I have built a distillation toolkit that supports cross-tokenizer distillation (e.g., distilling from LLaMA to Qwen vocab, or others). This approach has worked well on reasoning datasets like AIME, and we’ve validated on models like Phi and Qwen. We’ve also integrated Modal for quick deployment (with $30/month credits to try it out). Would love any feedback! GitHub: https://github.com/agokrani/distillKitPlus Docs: https://distillkitplus.mintlify.app/

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hey there HN! We've just open-sourced Vanna – a Python package that allows you to transform questions into SQL. We've leveraged LLMs to enable you to "ask" databases what you need, bypassing the need to "write" complex SQL. Quick Overview: - "Train" using DDL statements, documentation, or known correct SQL statements. - "Ask" questions in natural language and receive SQL, tables, and charts in return. - Open Source Flexibility: Swap storage mechanisms, customize LLMs, and choose your databases. - Local or Hosted: Operate everything locally or use our hosted version for free (including…

    2023 · vanna.ai · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hey HN, We are Zain and Ashish, founders of Vanna AI. We recently embarked on an experiment to see if large language models (specifically LLMs) could help in generating SQL queries for real-world datasets. We initially started this project as a web app but realized that it was most useful and had broadest applicability as a Python package since you can then incorporate it into an existing workflow (Jupyter notebook, Slackbot, etc). We've had some good success with customer datasets but we've generally heard a lot of skepticism so we decided to write a paper about the methodology we're using…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

Also compare

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →