AI Dictionary › AI Models

SLM (Small Language Model)

SLMs (Small Language Models) are compact language models, roughly from hundreds of millions to about ten billion parameters, designed to be fast, cheap and runnable on modest hardware: a laptop, a smartphone, an on-premise server.

Definition

The trade-off: less reasoning power and world knowledge than frontier models, but surprisingly strong performance on specific tasks, especially after targeted fine-tuning. Well-known examples: Microsoft's Phi family, Google's Gemma, and the smaller Llama and Mistral variants.

For companies, SLMs enable processing sensitive data without sending it out (privacy by design), minimal inference costs at high volume, very low latency and offline operation. The trend is hybrid: local SLMs for repetitive tasks, frontier cloud models for complex ones.

Related terms

• Parameters
• LLM (Large Language Model)
• Fine-tuning
• Latency
• Inference

More in AI Models

• ChatGPT
• Gemini
• Copilot
• Mistral
• Llama
• Claude
• GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer)
• DeepSeek

Put it into practice

• Real scenario: apply this concept with an instant AI verdict.
• Daily gym: short drills to train dictionary concepts.
• Playoff game: challenge other players, elimination-style.

📱 Download the Android app (beta) iOS coming soon

Say what you mean. Get what you need.

Grace Certified, the AI coach that trains and certifies your prompt engineering, by Agora Intelligence.