Model Surgery
Prune, Distill, and Rewire Open Models—Cut 90% of the Cost, Keep the Intelligence
General-purpose models carry billions of parameters you're paying for and never using. Learn to cut them out—surgically.
Every general-purpose LLM ships with vast neural machinery your use case never touches—and you pay for it in latency, memory, and cost on every single call. This masterclass turns the latest research on structural model optimization into production practice. You'll perform hands-on surgery on open models like Llama-3, Gemma, and Qwen: pruning unnecessary components, distilling knowledge into smaller students, and applying specialized fine-tuning to create cost-effective local SLMs optimized for YOUR domain and business goals. You'll combine behavioral analysis with structural modification—identifying exactly which parts of a model contribute to your goals and removing the ones that don't—and even apply fair pruning to reduce bias at the neuron level, improving ethics and efficiency in the same operation. This is model ownership at its deepest: not just training weights, but reshaping the architecture itself.
Your Competitive Moat
AI Hyper-Personalizes Your Experience
This isn't a one-size-fits-all course. It's assessed to your gaps, adapted to you, and finished with a custom deliverable you build and own.
Pre-Masterclass Assessment
You begin with an AI-driven assessment that maps what you already know against everything this masterclass covers. We pinpoint your knowledge gaps up front—so your time goes only where it moves the needle.
An AI-Personalized Path
Your results reshape the masterclass around you. The AI aligns the material, examples, and pace to close your specific gaps—so a fixed curriculum becomes a path built for exactly one person: you.
A Custom Deliverable You Own
You don't leave with a certificate—you leave with a real, working artifact built for your goals. In "Model Surgery," that means a deliverable you can ship, show, and build on. Something you made, not just something you watched.
Proven Transformation Results
Real outcomes from students who completed The LLM Sovereignty Stack™ and built their competitive moats
📈 Career Transformation
💰 Business Impact
What You'll Actually Build
Choose Your Path to Mastery
All modalities include the complete LLM Sovereignty Stack™. Choose based on your learning style and goals.
Self-Paced Mastery
- All 10 modules available immediately
- Lifetime access to content and updates
- Community support and code reviews
- Monthly live office hours
9-Week Live Cohort
- Weekly live workshops with Dr. Lee
- Surgery reviews on your target models
- Direct instructor access
- Graduation certificate
- Alumni network access
Founder's Edition
- One-on-one mentorship with Dr. Lee
- Surgical optimization plan for YOUR models
- API-replacement cost analysis
- 90-day satisfaction guarantee
5-Day Immersive Bootcamp
Executive intensive format. Prune and distill a real model in one week. Live behavioral-analysis labs.
Course Curriculum
10 transformative steps · 40 hours of hands-on content
Module 1: Why Rearchitect—The Case for Model Surgery
5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle
- What You're Really Paying For in a General-Purpose Model
- The Optimization Landscape: Fine-Tuning vs Pruning vs Distillation
- From Research Papers to Production Practice
- Setting Surgical Goals: Cost, Latency, Accuracy, Fairness
- Your Operating Room: Tooling and Model Setup
Module 2: Universal Architecture Customization
5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle
- Inside the Patient: Layers, Heads, and MLP Blocks
- Techniques That Work Across Model Families
- Measuring Component Contribution
- Safe Modification: Change, Test, Verify
- Hands-On: Your First Structural Modification
Module 3: End-to-End Rearchitecting Pipelines
5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle
- The Full Pipeline: Analyze → Modify → Recover → Evaluate
- Recovery Training: Healing the Model After Surgery
- Reproducibility: Pipelines You Can Run Again
- Regression Testing Structural Changes
- Hands-On: Build Your Rearchitecting Pipeline
Module 4: Model Cleanup—Bias & Explainability
5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle
- What Model Cleanup Reveals About Behavior
- Improving Explainability Through Structure
- Locating Bias in Neural Components
- Cleanup as a Trust-Building Practice
- Hands-On: Clean Up an Open Model and Document the Gains
Module 5: Replacing External LLMs with Local SLMs
5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle
- The API Replacement Decision: Economics and Risk
- Sizing the Local Model for Your Task
- Migration Strategy: Parallel Running and Cutover
- Proving Parity: Evaluation Before You Switch
- Hands-On: Replace an API Call with a Model You Own
Module 6: Specialized Fine-Tuning Techniques
5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle
- Fine-Tuning as Part of the Surgical Toolkit
- Domain Specialization on Modified Architectures
- Combining Structural Change with Targeted Training
- Avoiding Catastrophic Forgetting After Surgery
- Hands-On: Specialize Your Rearchitected Model
Module 7: Pruning & Knowledge Distillation
5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle
- Pruning Strategies: Width, Depth, and Structured Sparsity
- Knowledge Distillation: Teacher-Student Transfer
- How Much Can You Cut? Finding the Efficiency Frontier
- Combining Pruning and Distillation for Maximum Compression
- Hands-On: Distill a Pruned Model That Keeps Its Skills
Module 8: Behavioral Analysis & Structural Modification
5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle
- Watching the Model Think: Behavioral Probing
- Mapping Behavior to Structure
- Removing What Doesn't Serve Your Goals
- Verifying Behavior Is Preserved Where It Matters
- Hands-On: Behavior-Guided Surgery on a Real Model
Module 9: Fair Pruning
5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle
- Bias Lives in Neurons: The Fair Pruning Insight
- Identifying Bias-Carrying Components
- Pruning for Fairness AND Efficiency Simultaneously
- Measuring Bias Reduction Rigorously
- Hands-On: Apply Fair Pruning to an Open Model
Module 10: Cost-Effective Deployment & The Road Ahead
5 lessons · Shu-Ha-Ri cycle
- Serving Your Rearchitected Models in Production
- Quantization as the Final Compression Step
- Total Cost of Ownership: Proving the 90% Savings
- Future Directions in Structural Optimization
- Capstone: Ship a Surgically Optimized Model End to End
Production-Grade Tech Stack
Master the same tools used by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to build frontier AI systems
Frequently Asked Questions
Fine-tuning changes what weights say; model surgery changes what architecture exists. This masterclass operates a level deeper—pruning components, distilling into smaller students, and structurally rewiring open models. Fine-tuning is one tool in the surgical kit here, not the whole discipline.
Popular open models: Llama-3, Gemma, and Qwen families. The techniques are universal, so they transfer to new open-weight releases as they appear.
A single consumer GPU (or affordable cloud equivalent) handles the course exercises—working on smaller open models is exactly the point. The economics of surgery mean you need LESS hardware than standard fine-tuning workflows.
A technique for identifying and removing bias-carrying components at the neuron level—reducing model bias and model size in the same operation. You'll implement it hands-on and measure both the fairness and efficiency gains.
Stop Renting AI. Start Owning It.
Join 500+ engineers and founders who've gone from API consumers to model builders—building their competitive moats one step at a time.
Command $250K-$400K salaries or save $100K-$500K in annual API costs. Own your model weights. Build defensible technology moats. Become irreplaceable.
Self-paced · Lifetime access · 30-day guarantee
Start Your TransformationThis is not just education. This is technological sovereignty.