PhD: Sovereign AI—Distilling Tiny LMs for Local Deployment

University of Exeter; Exeter; On-site; GBP 20,000 - 24,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully funded PhD stipend

Job summary

The University of Exeter invites applications for a doctoral studentship funded by EPSRC under the Sovereign AI research programme. The project investigates agentic AI systems that run on local hardware and are reliable for bounded workflows such as procurement, invoice processing, and first-line support.

It will distill agentic capability from large models into smaller ones while optimising the harness and fine-tuning processes.

Responsibilities

• Study which parts of agent behaviour transfer to small models through fine-tuning, which parts are better placed in the harness.
• Develop methods to optimise the harness automatically for a given family of tasks and fixed local computation and latency.

Job description

The University of Exeter invites applications for a doctoral studentship funded by EPSRC under the Sovereign AI research programme. The project investigates agentic AI systems that run on local hardware and are reliable for bounded workflows such as procurement, invoice processing, and first-line support.

It will distill agentic capability from large models into smaller ones while optimising the harness and fine-tuning processes.