We had the privilege of hosting Peter Belcak – an AI Researcher working on the reliability and efficiency of agentic systems at NVIDIA – who walked us through his new paper making the rounds in AI circles titled “Small Language Models are the Future of Agentic AI.”

The paper posits that small language models (SLMs) are sufficiently powerful, inherently more suitable, and necessarily more economical for many invocations in agentic systems, and are therefore the future of agentic AI. The authors’ argumentation is grounded in the current level of capabilities exhibited by SLMs, the common architectures of agentic systems, and the economy of LM deployment. The authors further argue that in situations where general-purpose conversational abilities are essential, heterogeneous agentic systems (i.e., agents invoking multiple different models) are the natural choice. They discuss the potential barriers for the adoption of SLMs in agentic systems and outline a general LLM-to-SLM agent conversion algorithm.

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