Artificial intelligence companies that have spent billions of dollars building so-called large language models to power generative AI products are now banking on a new way to drive revenues: small language models.
Apple, Microsoft, Meta and Google have all recently released new AI models with fewer “parameters” — the number of variables used to train an AI system and shape its output — but still with powerful capabilities.
The moves are an effort by technology groups to encourage the adoption of AI by businesses who have concerns about the costs and computing power needed to run large language models, the type of technology underpinning popular chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.