IT leaders see big business potential in small AI models

“That’s 100% accurate,” says Patrick Buell, chief innovation officer at Hakkoda, an IBM company. “Tuned, open-source small language models run behind firewalls solve many of the security, governance, and cost concerns.” 

Tom Richer, a former CIO and founder of Intelagen, a Google Partner that develops and deploys specialized vertical AI solutions, says the Gartner report aligns with what he is seeing in the field.

“General-purpose LLMs have their place, but for specific business problems, smaller, fine-tuned models deliver better results with greater efficiency especially in regulated industries,” Richer says. “The main driver towards SLMs is the hallucination risk of LLMs. The tendency of general-purpose LLMs to generate inaccurate or nonsensical information, especially when dealing with specific or nuanced business contexts, is a significant barrier.”