Why We Still Need Small Language Models – Even in the Age of Frontier AI
- Author: The Alan Turing Institute
- Full Title: Why We Still Need Small Language Models – Even in the Age of Frontier AI
- Type:
- Tags: #ai #local
- URL: https://www.turing.ac.uk/blog/why-we-still-need-small-language-models-even-age-frontier-ai
Highlights
- The cost of inference can be prohibitive at scale. Reliance on closed-source providers raises the risk of vendor lock-in – especially problematic for public institutions like those we work with at the Turing. There are also privacy and deployment issues: centralised infrastructure isn’t always compatible with on-premise or secure workloads. And even open-weight frontier models like DeepSeek-R1 or Kimi K2 require serious hardware to run. Not to mention the growing concerns around energy usage and sustainability. (View Highlight)