AI glossary · Generative AI and LLMs
Small language model (SLM)
A small language model (SLM) is a compact language model with far fewer parameters than an LLM, built to be fast, cheap and able to run on a phone or laptop.
In more detail
Small models trade some knowledge and reasoning ability for speed, lower cost and privacy. Because they can run on your own device, your data doesn’t have to leave it.
They are often trained with help from bigger models through distillation, and work well for focused tasks like summarising or sorting text.
Example
A phone keyboard that rewrites a message offline is likely using a small language model.
Related terms
Large language model (LLM)A large language model (LLM) is an AI model trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate language. It powers chatbots like ChatGPT.Local AILocal AI means running an AI model on your own phone or computer instead of on a company’s servers, so it can work offline and keep your data on your device.DistillationDistillation trains a smaller AI model to copy the behaviour of a larger one, so you get much of the quality at a fraction of the size and cost.QuantizationQuantization shrinks an AI model by storing its numbers with less precision, so it uses less memory and runs faster, with a small loss in quality.
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