In more detail
A small language model is a deliberately compact AI — the hatchback to the frontier model’s truck. It trades raw brainpower for speed, tiny cost, and the ability to run on a phone or laptop, and it’s often built by distillation from a larger teacher.
It matters because most everyday AI jobs are small: summarize this message, suggest a reply, tidy this note. A small model does them instantly, cheaply, and even offline — which is why the AI features quietly living inside your phone are usually small models, not distant giants.
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