The next fight over small language models
The problem is not the idea. It is the second year.
The first numbers for small language models looked like a clear win. Once the edge cases were included, the picture changed.
Subscriber story
Continue reading with a subscription
This piece is part of the subscriber archive. Subscribe to the daily brief for full access — one email, no card, cancel any time.
Already a subscriber?
#licensing#datasets#models
More in this section
ai
Why small models are winning on-device
Four-bit quantization plus better distillation is making 3B models genuinely useful in production.
🔒aiSubscriber
Synthetic data is hitting a wall nobody wants to name
Model collapse is real, but the more immediate problem is boring: attribution and licensing.
🔒aiSubscriber
The open-weights licence split is becoming permanent
Two families of licence, two incompatible expectations, and a lot of downstream confusion.