Fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B to 96% of Claude Haiku on a domain-specific task using ~$3 of API calls and zero human labelers

Built a decision-reasoning engine (Orlog) and wanted to fine-tune a local model for it instead of paying per-call forever. The method (DV-DPO): Run a 3-voice council on each question, produce a synthesis Cross-examine: losing voices challenge the synthesis If synthesis gets revised → DPO pair (chose