Small Models

topic on 6 shows · 17 statements across 17 episodes

More or Less Latent Space No Priors the a16z Podcast Big Technology 20VC

17 statements about Small Models, every show

a16z Insight
Zhang: Fine-tuned small models can match or beat large frontier models
“And if you fine tune it to be really good at that task, it can be just as good or better than the big models.”
Jesse Zhang Jul 30, 2026 ▶ 3:45 How Decagon Runs 90% of Its Agents on Open-Source Models
Roy: Running AI models locally undermines centralized data center capex narratives
“Small models are gonna run locally on device. And that's actually gonna be how infrastructure gets built out. That throws such a wrench into any of these stories that we've been talking about for the last 30 minutes, like that completely destroys those stories…”
Ranjan Roy Mar 9, 2026 ▶ 22:28 AI Revenue Explodes, Dario’s Memo, McDonalds’ CEO’s Baby Burger Bite
a16z Assertion Not checkable as stated
Andreessen: Small AI models match frontier capabilities within 6 to 12 months
“If you track the capability of the leading edge models over time, what you find is after six or 12 months, there's a small model that's just as capable.”
Marc Andreessen Jan 7, 2026 ▶ 16:42 Marc Andreessen's 2026 Outlook: AI Timelines, US vs. China, and The Price of AI
a16z Prediction Didn’t hold up
Evans: On-device AI models will fail as capability gains outpace compression
“Will we have small models running on devices? No, because the small models, the capabilities are moving too fast for the small models to shrink the small model onto the device.”
Benedict Evans Dec 12, 2025 ▶ 52:37 AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on the Next Platform Shift
Morris: Small models should be defined as runnable on a single GPU
“I think that we should establish the definition of small model as being a model that a grad student can inference at reasonable time on a single GPU. Which is probably like seven B maybe. I don't think 27 is small under any reasonable.”
Jack Morris Jul 2, 2025 ▶ 52:05 Information Theory for Language Models: Jack Morris
Brown: Small LLMs default to skipping tool calls without explicit training
“If you set these models up to use tools, They just won't. Like if you say, hey, here's a question. You have access to these tools. Do as many rounds of tool calling as you want, and then submit your answer. They'll just submit their answer because they like ar…”
Will Brown May 23, 2025 ▶ 28:55 ⚡️Multi-Turn RL for Multi-Hour Agents — with Will Brown, Prime Intellect
MORE OR LESS Prediction Not checkable as stated
Khosla: Small models will not replace large frontier models for intelligence
“If you want human level intelligence from a model, it'll be a big model, and there'll be a couple of them around, some better than others, some a year or two ahead of others, but I don't think small models substitute For big models”
Vinod Khosla Dec 27, 2024 ▶ 43:20 #79: The More or Less Holiday Special Pt. 1 (AI Highlights) · More or Less Podcast
Ben Allal: Small models make more sense than large models for text extraction
“So I think text extraction is like one use case where small models can be really performant, and it makes sense to use them instead of just using larger models.”
Loubna Ben Allal Dec 24, 2024 ▶ 25:08 Best of 2024: Synthetic Data / Smol Models, Loubna Ben Allal, HuggingFace [LS Live! @ NeurIPS 2024]
MORE OR LESS Prediction Not checkable as stated
Khosla: Small models will never substitute for large, human-level AI models
“If you want human level intelligence from model, it'll be a big model, and there'll be a couple of them around. Some better than others, some a year or two ahead of others, but I don't think small models substitute for big models, but they do some things reall…”
Vinod Khosla Jun 14, 2024 ▶ 6:03 #51: Vinod Khosla on What to Build in AI · More or Less Podcast
Lambert: Scaling from 7B to 70B parameters fixes nuance and repetition
“I think the things that people see now is like the small models don't really handle nuance as well, and they could be more repetitive if, even if they have really good instruction tuning, but if you take that kind of seven to seventy billion parameter jump, li…”
Nathan Lambert Jan 11, 2024 ▶ 31:24 The Origin and Future of RLHF: the secret ingredient for ChatGPT - with Nathan Lambert
20VC Insight
Cohen: Undertrained large AI models underperform well-trained smaller models
“If you have a large model, That is undertrained. It will underperform a small model, which is really well, like well, well trained. So you're just wasting resources and you're going to get like less efficient results.”
Tomer Cohen Dec 20, 2023 ▶ 18:54 Roundtable #7: Spotify, Adobe and Linkedin on How AI Changes The Future of Product & Design | E1097 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
NO PRIORS Assertion Not checkable as stated
Qiu: The AI industry hasn't pushed data limits on small models
“We're definitely not pushing the bounds of what we can do with data today on small models, and so, you know, smaller things can work well.”
Kanjun Qiu Nov 16, 2023 ▶ 10:28 No Priors Ep. 41 | With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht
NO PRIORS Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sutskever: Larger AI models will unlock unprecedented value over small models
“I do think though that as models continue to get larger and better, then they will unlock new and unprecedentedly valuable applications. So yeah, the small models will have their niche for the less interesting applications, which are still very useful.”
Ilya Sutskever Nov 2, 2023 ▶ 20:57 No Priors Ep. 39 | With OpenAI Co-Founder & Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever
a16z Prediction Not checkable as stated
Murati: AI market will feature a diverse range of models
“You can see even today, you know, we make a lot of models available through our API and from the various, from the very small models to our frontier models, and people don't always need to use The most powerful, the most capable model. Sometimes they just need…”
Mira Murati Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 21:59 Where We Go From Here with OpenAI's Mira Murati
The Token Shortage Crisis Only Applies to AGI, Not Small Models
“I would say if we are aiming for AGI, there is a token crisis, but if we are aiming for useful small models, I don't think there is a token crisis.”
Eugene Cheah Aug 31, 2023 ▶ 1:27:16 RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era
NO PRIORS Prediction Not checkable as stated
Small Hive Architecture AI Models Will Massively Outperform Large Monolithic Models
“I think that small models will outperform large models massively, like I said, the Hive model aspect”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 44:38 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
NO PRIORS Opinion
Zaharia: Reducing hallucinations may be easier with small models than big ones
“It may actually be easier with small models than with big ones to reduce hallucination from them, but it, you know, I think it's still an open question”
Matei Zaharia Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 15:13 No Priors Ep. 11 | With Matei Zaharia, CTO of Databricks

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