Why Specialized SLMs Are the Standard From 2026 Onward
(Antonio V. Franco) If there is one thing I have learned over the last three years, it is that technology does not forgive naivety. And I was naive (quite expensively, in fact). In 2023, when ChatGPT exploded and the entire world woke up to the existence of large language models, I did exactly what everyone else did: I threw myself headfirst into the giants’ race. It was as if there were a silent, collective competition to see who could accumulate more parameters, more context tokens, more raw computational power. If your company was not paying a fortune in monthly API calls or building an entire GPU cluster to run the model with the most zeros in the spec sheet, you were “falling behind.” That was the mantra repeated in every keynote, every corporate blog post, every networking conversation about AI. ...