Why not generate an artificial dataset using commercial APIs and then finetune a small model on this data?

I’ve had success adapting even a 7B model for single-domain tasks that way, including reasoning and tool calling.

You can use an open model. The point is just to outsource the inference, so you don’t have to deal with running the larger model yourself.

This is probably one of the ways to achieve this. I see a plethora of such fine-tunes on HuggingFace [1], but they're either not much different than the base model or they're outright benchmaxxing.

[1] https://huggingface.co/models