Ductless AC systems get smart tech features--and the growing pains that come with them. App works well, with voice assistant support. Ductless mini-split air-conditioners have risen in popularity dramatically in recent years. One study now pegs their domestic market share at more than 40 percent compared to larger-scale HVAC units--and the smaller systems are even more popular in Asia and Europe than in the US. Mini-splits make a compelling climate control solution for a number of reasons.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for scalable educational applications, but their use in dialog-based tutoring systems remains challenging due to the need for effective pedagogical strategies and the high costs associated with expert-curated datasets. Our study explores the use of smaller, more affordable LLMs for one-on-one tutoring in the context of solving reading comprehension problems. We developed a synthetic tutoring dialog dataset, evaluated by human teachers, and fine-tuned a smaller LLM using this dataset. Furthermore, we conducted an interactive experiment comparing the performance of the fine-tuned model with a larger model in real-world tutoring scenarios. Our results show that the fine-tuned model performs on par with the larger model but at a lower cost, demonstrating a viable, cost-effective approach for implementing LLM-based tutoring systems in educational settings.