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Small language models

Peak · emerged June 2023 · high December 2025 · +44% on the month before · 6 mentions on Trending in 14 days

Origin

Compact models, a few billion parameters or less, trained to be good enough and cheap to run anywhere. Named by Gunasekar et al., Microsoft Research: Textbooks Are All You Need (phi-1) (Jun 20, 2023). Also called SLM, SLMs, Small models, Tiny models.

Index 0 to 100, monthly
04182202420252026Origin

Signals

SignalReads as
Hacker News stories, last 12 months57 stories, -2% on the 12 months beforeAdoption
arXiv papers, last 12 months665 papers, +66% on the 12 months beforeAdoption
Wikipedia views, August 20262,941, +44% on a year beforeAdoption
Product releases naming it1 since Sep 1, 2025Adoption
GitHub repositories2,818Adoption

Releases

1 release since Sep 1, 2025
Name
SLM update: Maintenance Windows and Facet Compliance are now Generally AvailableNew Relic · May 18, 2026 4 months ago

Models

Name
Phi 4Microsoft
Phi 4 PlusMicrosoft
Gemma 3 1bGoogle
Gemma 3 4bGoogle
Qwen3 4bAlibaba
Qwen3.5 4BAlibaba
Llama 3.2 3bMeta
Llama 3.2 1bMeta

GitHub projects

2,818 repositories
NameStars
microsoft/PhiCookBookThis is a Phi Family of SLMs book for getting started with Phi Models. Phi a family of open sourced AI models developed by Microsoft. Phi mo · May 7, 2024 2 years ago3,881
kpu/kenlmKenLM: Faster and Smaller Language Model Queries · Nov 15, 2011 14 years ago2,806
sammyuri/craftgptSmall language model built in Minecraft. · Sep 28, 2025 12 months ago724
mbzuai-oryx/MobiLlama[ICLR-2025-SLLM Spotlight 🔥]MobiLlama : Small Language Model tailored for edge devices · Feb 23, 2024 2 years ago670
Ucas-HaoranWei/Vary-toyOfficial code implementation of Vary-toy (Small Language Model Meets with Reinforced Vision Vocabulary) · Jan 10, 2024 2 years ago630
HKUDS/LightReasoner[ACL 2026 Oral] "LightReasoner: Can Small Language Models Teach Large Language Models Reasoning?" · Sep 29, 2025 12 months ago611

Related movements

MovementStage
Local AIRunning language and image models on your own laptop, phone or server instead of a cloud API.Peak
Open-weight modelsModels whose trained weights anyone can download, run and fine-tune: Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral and more.Rising
Synthetic dataTraining and evaluation data generated by models or simulators instead of collected from people.Declining

History

DateWhat changed
Sep 24, 2026Tracking started: emerged June 2023, peak, 4 other names recorded

Sources: Curve: Hacker News story titles, Wikipedia pageviews and arXiv papers by month, refreshed Sep 24, 2026. Related entities from the fru.dev sites' public APIs, matched by name. How stages work.

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