Why small language models are the quiet revolution
NEO Campus Editorial22 February 20266 min read
Frontier models grab headlines, but small models are quietly doing most of the useful work in production AI systems.
Cost and latency
A 3B model on commodity GPUs answers in tens of milliseconds at a fraction of the cost of a frontier API call.
Privacy and control
Self-hosted models keep customer data inside your perimeter, which simplifies compliance enormously.
Good enough for narrow tasks
Classification, extraction, summarisation, and routing rarely need a frontier model.
