What is SLM?

Explained

Small language models target narrow vocabularies or workflows—often fine-tuned or distilled—making them economical for high-QPS assistants, on-device, or hybrid routing with a larger model.

Decision guides that use this term

• Open-source vs proprietary LLMs: how should an enterprise choose?
• Sovereign or on-prem AI vs cloud AI APIs: where should your models run?
• Small vs large language models: which one should run your enterprise use case?

Further reading

• Generative AI Profitability: Value Assessment and Production Barriers

Related terms

• Agent Agenda The agent’s live plan: ordered steps, open subtasks, and checkpoints toward a goal.
• Agent Planner Component or prompt pattern that proposes multi-step plans before tools run.
• Agent Skill Packaged capability for an agent: instructions, allowed tools, and I/O schemas for one coherent task.
• Agentic AI AI systems that act autonomously, make decisions, and execute tasks in sequence.
• AI Agent Software entity that perceives its environment, makes decisions, and executes actions to achieve goals.
• BERT Pre-trained language model that revolutionized NLP; foundation of many semantic search systems.