# Small Language Models (SLMs)
Language models with relatively few parameters (typically under 10B) designed for efficiency, on-device deployment, and domain-specific tasks. Examples: Phi (Microsoft), Gemma (Google), Llama 3.2 1B/3B (Meta).
SLMs challenge the assumption that bigger is always better; with good training data and distillation, small models achieve surprisingly strong performance on targeted tasks.
Key advantages: low latency, low cost, privacy (runs locally), deployable on mobile/edge devices. Trade-off: less general capability than large models; excel at specific tasks, struggle with broad reasoning.
## References
## Related
- [[Large Language Models (LLMs)]]
- [[Knowledge Distillation]]
- [[Gemini Nano]]
- [[On-Device Machine Learning]]
- [[Edge AI]]
- [[Browser-Provided Language Models]]
- [[Transformers.js]]