Small Language Models are the Future of Agentic AI

In this episode, we discuss Small Language Models are the Future of Agentic AI by Peter Belcak, Greg Heinrich, Shizhe Diao, Yonggan Fu, Xin Dong, Saurav Muralidharan, Yingyan Celine Lin, Pavlo Molchanov. The paper argues that small language models (SLMs) are more suitable, powerful enough, and cost-effective for many specialized agentic AI tasks compared to large language models (LLMs). It proposes that heterogeneous agentic systems using multiple models are ideal when general conversational abilities are needed and presents an algorithm for converting LLM-based agents to SLM-based ones. The authors emphasize the economic and operational benefits of shifting towards SLMs and invite further discussion to advance affordable AI deployment.