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Come 2025, small is set to make a big impact in AI. Executives say small language models (SLMs) will play a key role in driving the democratisation and business impact of artificial intelligence in the year ahead. ET Year-end Special Reads How India's political landscape changed after assembly polls in eight states Trent, Zomato among 33 biggest wealth creators this year.
What will make money in 2025? Telcos investment recovery in limbo, price war with satcom services likely in 2025 “SLMs will be a big theme in the next calendar year,” Infosys CEO Salil Parekh told ET. “The reason that they will have a greater impact is that they work on smaller datasets, which are more prevalent within organisations, and you can have a deeper impact through them. The organisations also want to work on their datasets more than what’s in a common domain,” he said.
Like large language models (LLMs), SLMs can generate human-like language but are trained on smaller datasets with fewer parameters. They are said to be easier to train and use, consuming less computational power, more cost-effective, and better suited for specific tasks. The year 2024 saw launches of a slew of lightweight models, from Microsoft ’s Phi family of SLMs to Google’s Gemma and a smaller variant of Meta’s Llama model.
“Throughout 2024, large language models have pushed the boundaries of accuracy across various AI tasks, while small language models have driven mass adoption and true democratisation of artificial intelligence,” said Sundar Srinivasan, president, AI and search, at Microsoft India Development Centre. Artificial Intelligence(AI) Java Programming with ChatGPT: Learn using Generative AI By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) Basics of Generative AI: Unveiling Tomorrows Innovations By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) Generative AI for Dynamic Java Web Applications with ChatGPT By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) Mastering C++ Fundamentals with Generative AI: A Hands-On By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) Master in Python Language Quickly Using the ChatGPT Open AI By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Marketing Performance Marketing for eCommerce Brands By - Zafer Mukeri, Founder- Inara Marketers View Program Office Productivity Zero to Hero in Microsoft Excel: Complete Excel guide 2024 By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Finance A2Z Of Money By - elearnmarkets, Financial Education by StockEdge View Program Marketing Modern Marketing Masterclass by Seth Godin By - Seth Godin, Former dot com Business Executive and Best Selling Author View Program Astrology Vastu Shastra Course By - Sachenkumar Rai, Vastu Shashtri View Program Strategy Succession Planning Masterclass By - Nigel Penny, Global Strategy Advisor: NSP Strategy Facilitation Ltd. View Program Data Science SQL for Data Science along with Data Analytics and Data Visualization By - Metla Sudha Sekhar, IT Specialist and Developer View Program Artificial Intelligence(AI) AI and Analytics based Business Strategy By - Tanusree De, Managing Director- Accenture Technology Lead, Trustworthy AI Center of Excellence: ATCI View Program Web Development A Comprehensive ASP.
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Use cases include transcribing patient interactions, data entry for electronic health records and preliminary diagnostic support. In banking or finance, SLMs will aid with personalised financial advice, fraud detection and document analysis and processing, he said. In the coming year, SLMs will take centre stage, driven by the need for LLMs to be commercially viable for scale and their tooling becoming more developer-centric for fine-tuning them for specific needs and use cases, said Vishal Chahal, vice president at IBM India Software Labs.
Open-source initiatives in 2024 were a promising development enabling developers to fine-tune SLMs using LLMs, he noted. “2025 and beyond will see SLMs becoming embedded into business processes and also gaining ability to run on edge devices and on-prem infrastructure, giving users control over how data exchanges with these technologies can be user controlled,” Chahal said. Further, they will become an ideal choice for real-time GenAI applications on mobile, internet of things and edge devices, which have limited computational resources, as well as specific customer-centric tasks and personalised support, he added.
Experts said these smaller models can be expected to power more personalised digital agents and assistants for tailored experiences and responses. For instance, customer support will see exponential improvements in personalisation, efficiency, customer empathy and management of language diversity with virtual SLM-based deployments. Legal and manufacturing sectors also stand to benefit significantly from SLM deployment, they said.
Meanwhile, the use of LLMs will be more focused on complex tasks with a need for multi-dimensional understanding across varied areas, with higher adoption in knowledge discovery and pattern mining that have a need for newer insights on large volumes of data..
