Benefits of Smaller Models
- Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness: Smaller models require less compute power and storage, making them more cost-effective to deploy and maintain, especially for organizations operating at scale. For example, Microsoft’s Phi-2, which includes 2.7 billion parameters, outperforms significantly larger models on key benchmarks.
- Faster Training and Inference: Their reduced size means smaller models can be trained and fine-tuned more quickly, which accelerates the development cycle and allows businesses to iterate and deploy updates faster. This increased speed can be a competitive advantage, enabling quicker adaptation and responsiveness to new data and requirements with fewer latency issues.
- Domain Specialization: Fine-tuning smaller models on specific datasets allows for highly specialized applications. When focused on niche areas, these models can offer more precise and contextually relevant outputs compared to their larger, more generalized counterparts.
Challenges of Smaller Models
- Data Quality and Bias: Ensuring the quality of the training data is critical, especially with regard to the accuracy of its data representations. Smaller models are particularly sensitive to biases present in their datasets. As noted by McKinsey and others, models trained on non-diverse data can perpetuate existing biases, leading to flawed outputs.
- Security and Privacy Concerns: Smaller models are not inherently more secure than large models and face significant security risks, including data leaks and susceptibility to adversarial attacks. Effective governance and robust security measures are necessary to mitigate these risks.
- Integration Complexity: Integrating smaller models into existing systems can be challenging, requiring careful orchestration and compatibility checks. Model-agnostic tools can help alleviate some of these issues by providing a standardized interface for deploying various models.
Use Cases for Smaller Models
- Customer Support and Service Automation: Fine-tuned models are being used to enhance customer service by providing accurate and timely responses. McKinsey reports that companies have seen improvements in customer satisfaction and efficiency when they have used smaller, fine-tuned models to automate routine inquiries, freeing up human representatives for more complex tasks.
- Healthcare Applications: Smaller and fine-tuned models are particularly useful in healthcare for applications. By leveraging specific medical data, these models can provide valuable insights that support diagnostic assistance, personalized treatment plans, and clinical decision-making.
- Drug Discovery: Smaller multimodal models are used in the pharmaceutical industry to analyze complex datasets, such as microscopy images, to accelerate drug discovery processes. This approach speeds up research and enhances the accuracy of predictions and outcomes.
