Show HN: Open-source LLM and dataset for sports forecasting (Pro Golf)
bturtel Tuesday, February 24, 2026
Hey HN, I fine-tuned a small open-source model on golf forecasting and it beats GPT-5 at predicting golf outcomes. The same approach can be used to build a specialized model in any domain, you just need to update a few search queries.
We fine-tuned gpt-oss-120b with LoRA on 3,178 golf forecasting questions, using GRPO with Brier score as the reward.
Our model outperformed GPT-5 on Brier Skill (17% vs 12.8%) and ECE (6% vs 10.6%) on 855 held-out questions.
How to try it: the model and dataset are open-source, with code, on Hugging Face.
How to build your own specialized model: Update the search queries and instructions in the Lightning Rod SDK to generate a new forecasting dataset, then run the same GRPO + LoRA recipe.
SDK link: https://github.com/lightning-rod-labs/lightningrod-python-sd... Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LightningRodLabs/GolfForecas... Model: https://huggingface.co/LightningRodLabs/Golf-Forecaster
Questions, feedback on the SDK, suggestions for new domains to try this on - all are welcome.