AI startup Hugging Face envisions that small—not large—language models will be used for applications including “next stage robotics,” its Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer Thomas Wolf said. “We want to deploy models in robots that are smarter, so we can start having robots that are not only on assembly lines, but also in the wild,” Wolf said while speaking at Web Summit in Lisbon today. But that goal, he said, requires low latency. “You cannot wait two seconds so that your robots understand what’s happening, and the only way we can do that is through a small language model,” Wolf added. Small language models “can do a lot of the tasks we thought only large models could do,” Wolf said, adding that they can also be deployed on-device. “If you think about this kind of game changer, you can have them running on your laptop,” he said. “You can have them running even on your smartphone in the future.” Ultimately, he envisions small language models running “in almost every tool or appliance that we have, just like today, our fridge is connected to the internet.” The firm released its SmolLM language model earlier this year. “We are not the only one,” said Wolf, adding that, “Almost every open source company has been releasing smaller and smaller models this year.”

Full story : Hugging Faces’ small language models to power next stage of robotics.