AI with Reduced Cost Is Good News for Companies

MALL language models (SLMs) are more cost-effective and the inference cost is much less than large language models (LLMs), says Balakrishna D R, aka Bali, executive vice-president and global services head of AI and industry verticals at Infosys.

- UMA KANNAN @ Bengaluru

MALL language models (SLMs) are more cost-effective and the inference cost is much less than large language models (LLMs), says Balakrishna D R, aka Bali, executive vice-president and global services head of AI and industry verticals at Infosys. In an interaction with TNIE, Bali spoke about DeepSeek, Agentic AI, and the need to upskill employees in AI. Excerpts:

What are small language models (SLM) and what are their advantages?
Small is the new big. SLMs are more cost-effective. The inference cost is much less than a large language model. Also, they can be fine-tuned for a specific context. Large language models usually are trained with all the data that is available in public forums. This can be fine-tuned for the specific data that you may have within your organization as well. The other big advantage is that you can host it within your organization firewall so that you can ensure secure handling of proprietary or sensitive data without having to go outside your enterprise boundaries.

Can you explain its use cases?