Small Language Models (SLMs)
In short
Language models small enough to run on general-purpose hardware like your laptop or phone.
Large Language Models are the AI systems behind tools like ChatGPT and Claude — powerful, but they typically need expensive servers to run. Small Language Models are the lighter versions, built to bring similar capabilities to everyday devices.
The “small” label is relative and keeps shifting. Today’s community usually calls a model an SLM when it can run on consumer hardware. The large ones need more specialized resources. There’s no clear common definition for the sizing — and as technology gets better, we can run bigger models on less hardware, so the line keeps moving. Most people just call everything LLMs regardless.
Related
- LLMs - SLMs are the smaller variant
- Open vs Closed Models - SLMs are often open models