Topic · Concept
Small models
Small models are language models designed to be cheap and fast enough to run at high volume or on local hardware such as laptops and phones. Labs ship them as "mini," "Flash," "Haiku" or "Lite" tiers, and they are often the best choice when a task does not need a frontier model.
Fact file
Example on-device modelphi-3-mini, 3.8B parameters, "small enough to be deployed on a phone" (Apr 22, 2024)
Knowledge distillation (canonical paper)Hinton, Vinyals, Dean, "Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network," Mar 9, 2015
Example commercial small tierClaude Haiku 5.5: 1M context; API price "from $0.10 / from $0.50" per MTok
Example commercial small tierGemini 3.5 Flash-Lite and 3.1 Flash-Lite listed as stable
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Small models are language models designed to be cheap and fast enough to run at high volume or on local hardware…