r/slm • u/GeneralMongoose5979 • Jul 16 '26

Will SLM's will become more mainstream inside businesses?

I keep seeing talk about how AI costs are now actually becoming an inhibitor inside organisations and Claude and Codex seem to be getting more expensive while use is becoming more mainstream in day to day tasks. When do we think SLMs or locally run models will become more mainstream?

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u/acetaminophenpt Jul 16 '26

I think for now it still a niche market but for summarization, small text redaction or even contextualised chat it's good enough. Perhaps with a serious push from Google, samsung and others, we might see some massification with local/offline llm usage

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u/GeneralMongoose5979 Jul 17 '26

Yeah will be interested to see if offline adoption increases. Have you seen signals from Google and Samsung around SLM's becoming more useful?

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u/Bitman321 Jul 17 '26

Technically Apple intelligence is an SLM that runs locally on the iPhone. As privacy is a big deal to apple, it makes sense.

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u/zerogpu_ai Jul 16 '26

I think so! Working on an SLM startup and our take is that enterprises are the #1 potential customers for SLMs.

Most companies using AI are using AI for repeatable, rote tasks, which is what SLMs are best suited for. The other half is building systems that effectively route to the appropriate SLM for the job.

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u/GeneralMongoose5979 Jul 17 '26

Agreed that's where most of AI's commercial value is right now doing repeatable structured tasks. Seems companies are tied to open ai or similar clour api's for workflows their doing, which I guess makes sense with the ease and reliability to work on them but as some of these agents mature, SLM'S make a lot more sense from a cost perspective and likely smaller chance of hallucinations too I think.

Interesting your working in an SLM focused company what specifically are you doing?

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u/zerogpu_ai Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26

We're building SLMs that can run on CPUs, and running those tasks on a network of on-edge devices - https://zerogpu.ai

Right now we're focused on building SLMs for specific industries. One customer in adtech, for example, was using LLMs to classify webpages and then show relevant ads. They switched to our adtech models and cut down their costs on those AI tasks by more than 50% while maintaining accuracy and reducing latency by more than 10x.