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Home/Glossary/Small Language Model (SLM)
AI Glossary Term

What does “Small Language Model (SLM)” mean?

Definition

A compact language model optimized for lower latency, cost, or on-device usage.

Related terms

Speculative Decoding
An inference acceleration method where a small draft model proposes tokens that a larger model verifies in parallel.
SentencePiece
A language-agnostic tokenizer that learns subword units directly from raw text without pre-splitting on whitespace.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The broad field of building systems that perform tasks requiring pattern recognition, reasoning, language, or decision-making.
Context Window
The maximum amount of input tokens a language model can process at once.
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)
A neural architecture optimized for processing grid-like data such as images.
Few-Shot Learning
Learning or adapting behavior from only a small number of examples.

Learn more in our free guides

AI Models ExplainedModel CollapseModel LifecycleModel Context Protocol

See also

Sentiment AnalysisSparse ModelSelf-Supervised LearningSupervised LearningSemantic SearchSynthetic DataScaling LawSystem Prompt
PreviousSentiment AnalysisNextSparse Model
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