What is Small language model (SLM)?
A small language model (SLM) is a language model with far fewer parameters than the largest frontier models, typically from a few hundred million to several billion. It trades some general ability for lower cost, faster responses and the option to run on modest hardware or directly on a device.
Why it matters for your business
For focused tasks like classification, extraction or routing, an SLM can be cheaper and faster than a large model, and it can run in your own environment for privacy.
A company fine-tunes a small model to sort incoming support emails by topic and runs it on its own servers, sending only complex cases to a larger model.