PhD Studentship: Sovereign Agentic AI: Distilling Small Language Model Agents for Local Deployment
University of Exeter Exeter £21,805 pa
Investigates whether small language models running on local workstations or on-premises servers can serve as reliable agents for bounded business workflows. The student will distil agentic capability from large teacher models via harness optimisation and fine-tuning on execution traces, measuring reliability, cost, latency and data locality, and releasing open tooling for UK SMEs.