CR Innovations Lab

Corey Ryan's lab notes on local AI, fine-tuning, and small-business automation

I'm Corey Ryan. I run Ryan² Design Labs, where we build AI employees for small businesses: voice agents that answer the phone, follow-up that never forgets, and the plumbing that connects them to the tools a business already uses.

This domain is the lab side. Everything here runs on hardware I own: consumer GPUs, a 12-year-old server, and a lot of measurement. I write up what I learn, including the parts that didn't work.

How I work

Self-taught, decades in. I'd rather measure than guess, and I'd rather build the thing than read another post about building the thing. Rules get a fair hearing and then I try it anyway. If I tell you something works, there's a number behind it, and if I was wrong, that gets written up too. Salt Lake City, with mountains close enough to think in.

What's on the bench

• The article series — engineering write-ups on local inference, training-data curriculum, and the mistakes that cost real GPU hours. Seven so far. Read them.
• WILLAI — a self-improving agent harness: every task is decomposed into testable criteria, proven with evidence, and the misses are captured as training data. It runs my day.
• Local inference stack — an orchestrator that routes requests across a few consumer GPUs, with a 0.5B gate model deciding when the 14B is actually needed. The benchmark write-ups come from this.
• AI Studio — a browser workspace for planning, drafting, and shipping content with local and hosted models side by side.

Elsewhere

• LinkedIn — where the articles get discussed
• Ryan² Design Labs — the business
• Omnyka — co-founder and CTO. AI help desk agents for MSPs, built on locally run, custom-trained models.