A few weeks ago, I processed a product refund with Amazon via agent. It was simple, straightforward, and surprisingly obvious that it was backed by a language model based on how it responded to my frustration about it asking tons of questions. But in the end, it processed my refund without ever connecting me with a human being.
I don't know whether Amazon relies on LLMs or SLMs for this and for similar interactions, but it makes tons of financial sense to use SLMs for narrowly scoped agents. In use cases like customer service, the intelligence behind LLMs is all wasted on the task the agents are trained for.
Wouldn't surprise me if down the road we start suggesting role-specific SLMs rather than general LLMs as both an ethics- and security-risk mitigation too.
One could start with a large model for exploration during development, and then distill it down to a small model that covers the variety of the task and fits on a USB drive. E.g. when I use a model for gardening purposes, I could prune knowledge about other topics.
A few weeks ago, I processed a product refund with Amazon via agent. It was simple, straightforward, and surprisingly obvious that it was backed by a language model based on how it responded to my frustration about it asking tons of questions. But in the end, it processed my refund without ever connecting me with a human being.
I don't know whether Amazon relies on LLMs or SLMs for this and for similar interactions, but it makes tons of financial sense to use SLMs for narrowly scoped agents. In use cases like customer service, the intelligence behind LLMs is all wasted on the task the agents are trained for.
Wouldn't surprise me if down the road we start suggesting role-specific SLMs rather than general LLMs as both an ethics- and security-risk mitigation too.
One could start with a large model for exploration during development, and then distill it down to a small model that covers the variety of the task and fits on a USB drive. E.g. when I use a model for gardening purposes, I could prune knowledge about other topics.
Pruning is exactly what you're looking for in a gardening SLM
Slightly related, on the cooperation between large models and small models (traditional ML) : https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06857