Chapter 1
The shift to small and smart
Chapter 2
Decoding nature and health
Chapter 3
Code and hardware masterminds
Chapter 4
Finding needles in digital haystacks
Ch 1 · The shift to small and smart
steve Specialist AI Models
We retired the giant that tried to do it all, Now the smartest systems are focused and small.
BETA
steve Deploy eight specialist AI friends to tasks to discover how they beat one giant generalist.
steve Moving to smaller, specialized AI models cuts operational costs and factual errors caused by giant, gigawatt-consuming generalist systems.
Quiz
Why are tech companies shifting away from building ever-larger generalist AI models in 2026?
Quiz
According to the Stanford HAI 2026 AI Index, what range of hallucination rates was found across frontier models?
steve Eight narrow specialist systems outperform a single giant generalist model on routine tasks.
Quiz
Compared to cloud-based giant models, how much cheaper is it to run a small language model?
Fun Fact
AI electricity: Giant AI queries use ten times more power than search queries, but tiny specialist models run on a fraction of a smartphone's battery.
Quiz
Which open-weight base model did Microsoft use to build its Decision-1 specialist model?
Glossary
small language model (noun)
An artificial intelligence system trained on a limited parameter scale to process and generate natural language. In 2026, developers increasingly deployed these compact systems to run locally on devices, reducing cloud reliance.
An artificial intelligence system trained on a limited parameter scale to process and generate natural language. In 2026, developers increasingly deployed these compact systems to run locally on devices, reducing cloud reliance.
Quiz
What is the parameter size of the compact DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen model highlighted in 2026?
Quiz
What is the name of the process used to transfer reasoning abilities from giant AI models to tiny ones like DeepSeek-R1-Distill?