K-Culture GlossaryㅅTechnical words in the news
SLM
A language model shrunk down small enough to run on a phone or laptop. These days the competition is all about whether "smaller" can still mean "smart enough."
In plain words
Small Language Model — a language model built small enough to run on your phone or laptop. Unlike large models with trillions of parameters, SLMs run in the hundreds of millions to low billions, making them the heart of on-device AI.
Their reason for existing: "small, but good enough at specific tasks." Everyday jobs like summarizing, translating, or organizing a schedule don't really need a frontier model. As distillation and quantization techniques have improved, small models have gotten sharply better, and you keep seeing headlines along the lines of "this 3B model matches last year's large models."
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