Tech companies are aiming for smaller and leaner AI models

AI firms have long boasted about the enormous size and capabilities of their products, but they are increasingly looking at leaner, smaller models that they say will save on energy and cost.

Programs like ChatGPT are underpinned by algorithms known as "large language models", and the chatbot's creator bragged last year that its GPT-4 model had nearly two trillion "parameters", the building blocks of the models.

The vast size of GPT-4 allows ChatGPT to handle queries about anything from astrophysics to zoology.

But if a company needs a program with knowledge only of, say, tigers, the algorithm can be much smaller.

"You don't need to know the terms of the Treaty of Versailles to answer a question about a particular element of engineering," said Laurent Felix of Ekimetrics, a firm that advises companies on AI and sustainability.

Google, Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI have all started offering smaller models.

Amazon too allows for all sizes of models on its cloud platform.

Smaller models are better for simple tasks like summarizing and indexing documents or searching an internal database.

U.S. pharmaceutical company Merck, for example, is developing a model with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to understand the impact of certain diseases on genes.

"It will be a very small model, between a few hundred million and a few billion parameters," said Nicolas de Bellefonds, head of AI at BCG.

Laurent Daudet, head of French AI startup LightOn, which specialises in smaller models, said they had several advantages over their larger siblings.

They were often faster and able to "respond to more queries and more users simultaneously," he said.

He also pointed out that they were less energy hungry, the...