AI Glossary

Small language model

Also called SLM

What does “Small language model” mean?

Small language model: Language models with far fewer parameters than the largest systems, often a few billion or less, so they can run on laptops, phones or modest servers. They trade some breadth of knowledge and reasoning for speed, lower cost and the option to keep data on-device.

Small language model visual guide: Language models with far fewer parameters than the largest systems, often a few billion or less, so they can run on laptops, phones or modest servers. They trade some breadth of knowledge and reasoning for speed, lower cost and the option to keep data on-device.
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What is an example of “Small language model”?

Microsoft's Phi and Google's Gemma families include small models suited to tasks like on-device summarization or private document search.

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See also

Large language modelTermOpen-weight modelTermKnowledge distillationTermOn-device AITerm

Same topic

State-space modelTermSelf-attentionTermTransformerTermRecurrent neural networkTermVariational autoencoderTerm