What even is a small language model now?

What Even Is a Small Language Model Now? 15 May 2025 Yoeven D Khemlani Share this article If you asked someone in 2018 what a "small model" was, they'd probably say something with a few million parameters that ran on a Raspberry Pi or your phone. Fast-forward to today, and we're calling 30B parameter models "small"—because they only need one GPU to run. So yeah, the definition of "small" has changed. Small Used to Mean... Actually Small Back in the early days of machine learning, a "small model" might've been a decision tree or a basic neural net that could run on a laptop CPU. Think scikit-learn, not LLMs. Then came transformers and large language models (LLMs). As these got bigger and better, anything not requiring a cluster of A100s suddenly started to feel... small by comparison. Today, small is more about how deployable the model is, not just its size on paper. Types of Small Models (By 2025 Standards) We now have two main flavors of small language models: 1. Edge-Optimiz ... Read full article.