Small Language Models: Complete 2026 Guide for Smart Teams
Small language models now handle most routine business AI work at a fraction of frontier-model cost. This guide maps the 2026 field — Phi-4-reasoning-vision, Gemma 4, Qwen 3.5 Small, Claude Haiku 4.5 and Ministral 3 — and shows exactly when a compact model beats a frontier LLM on cost, privacy and latency. It closes with a hardware plan and a 90-day deployment roadmap.
