Small Language Model
News & Insights
Text analystics tools

In a text analytics tool use case, the objective is to analyze large volumes of text data to extract insights such as sentiment, topic detection, or keyword extraction. Small language models (SLMs) and large language models (LLMs) offer different trade-offs in terms of speed, efficiency, and quality of analysis. Here’s a comparison showing how SLMs can outperform LLMs in certain scenarios.
Use Case: Sentiment Analysis for Customer Reviews
Scenario
A business wants to perform sentiment analysis on thousands of customer reviews daily to gauge customer satisfaction. Both an SLM and an LLM are deployed to analyze the sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) of these reviews.
Key Metrics for Comparison
Latency: Time taken to analyze one review.
Resource Utilization: Memory usage and compute power.
Sentiment Accuracy: Accuracy in classifying the sentiment of a review.
Throughput: Number of reviews analyzed per second.
Metric
Model Size
Latency (average)
Memory Usage (RAM)
Compute Power
Energy Consumption
Sentiment Accuracy
Throughput
Small Language Model (SLM)
40M parameters
0.02 seconds/review
200 MB
CPU only
1.8 kWh/month
88%
50 reviews/second
Large Language Model (LLM)
1.2B parameters
1.5 seconds/review
7 GB
GPU/High-end CPU
15 kWh/month
94%
0.66 reviews/second
Technical Insights
Latency: The SLM processes sentiment analysis 75x faster than the LLM (0.02 seconds vs. 1.5 seconds per review). This difference becomes crucial when analyzing high volumes of text data, as businesses can process thousands of reviews in real-time with minimal delay using an SLM. In contrast, the LLM’s higher latency limits real-time processing.
Memory and Compute Efficiency: SLMs require far fewer resources, with only 200 MB of RAM, making them highly efficient for on-premises or edge deployments. LLMs, on the other hand, demand significant memory (7 GB) and generally require a GPU for efficient operation. This makes LLMs costlier and harder to scale without cloud infrastructure.
Throughput: The SLM achieves significantly higher throughput, processing 50 reviews per second compared to the LLM’s 0.66 reviews per second. This high throughput allows SLMs to handle large-scale text analytics tasks with ease, making them ideal for applications with strict time constraints or resource limitations.
Sentiment Accuracy: LLMs do offer superior sentiment accuracy (94% vs. 88%), particularly for more nuanced or ambiguous reviews. However, for simple reviews where the sentiment is more straightforward (e.g., "Great product!" or "Horrible experience!"), SLMs can achieve adequate accuracy while performing much faster.
Business Insight
Cost Efficiency: Running an SLM for text analytics drastically reduces infrastructure and operational costs. The SLM consumes fewer resources (memory, CPU), and its lower energy consumption (1.8 kWh/month vs. 15 kWh/month) results in significant savings. Additionally, businesses can avoid the costs associated with GPU infrastructure required for LLMs, lowering overall expenses.
Speed and Scalability: With the ability to analyze 50 reviews per second, SLMs can handle large volumes of customer feedback in real-time, allowing businesses to quickly identify customer sentiment and respond accordingly. For companies that manage thousands of reviews daily, SLMs offer a solution that scales without the need for costly cloud processing.
Accuracy Trade-offs: While LLMs offer slightly better accuracy in sentiment detection, the marginal improvement may not justify the additional cost and slower speed for many businesses. For straightforward sentiment analysis, SLMs provide good-enough accuracy at a fraction of the operational cost, making them the more practical choice for routine tasks.
Real-time Insights: By leveraging an SLM’s near-instant analysis time, businesses can generate real-time insights from customer feedback, enabling faster decision-making and quicker identification of trends or issues. This real-time capability is especially important for businesses looking to monitor customer sentiment during product launches or marketing campaigns.
Benchmarking Example
Assume a business needs to analyze 100,000 customer reviews daily.
SLM Processing Time: 0.02 seconds/review → 33 minutes total for all reviews.
LLM Processing Time: 1.5 seconds/review → 41 hours total for all reviews.
This comparison highlights that the SLM is 74x faster than the LLM, making it far more suitable for real-time or large-scale text analytics.
Conclusion
For text analytics tools such as sentiment analysis, small language models (SLMs) outperform large language models (LLMs) in terms of efficiency, speed, and resource utilization. While LLMs offer slightly higher accuracy, the performance gains in speed and scalability with SLMs make them the superior choice for many practical applications, especially when handling large datasets or operating in environments with limited resources. Businesses benefit from reduced operational costs and faster insights, making SLMs the preferred solution for routine text analytics tasks.