The death of SLMs?

I love to see these impressive models coming out that compete with the giants from companies like Z.ai, Moonshot, Alibaba, etc. A win for the open source/weight community is always welcome. While I am grateful, I worry we might be seeing the slow death of models smaller than 27B. The ones released paling in comparison to Qwen 3.5 4B/9B and Gemma 4 12B. Especially for agentic coding and agentic assistance tasks. Is this because we’ve really hit the limit of what we can accomplish with models in the 3B-12B weight class? Or is it because such models aren’t as profitable as their gargantuan counterparts that attempting to improve them to match isn’t viable? Have I been missing these impressive smaller model in lieu of the larger ones taking the headlines? If so, please let me know what models within the SLM weight class you are running for tasks like agentic coding, agentic assistance, or both. I also hear agentic coding is not feasible under 27B. I’m not asking for a model that can one shot an ultra realistic multiplayer call of duty clone in a single html file. Just something the least bit capable in real workflows like the aforementioned. submitted by /u/HadesTerminal [link] [comments]

Related

• What would it take for the frontier labs to open the weights of their old, deprecated proprietary models?
• Kimi K3 in the next few hours. Deepseek V4 GA later in the week. New Liquid models. New Mistral models sometime this month. And some rumours suggest GLM 5.5 is coming in August. Openweight AI is eating good.
• Qwen3.8-Max matches Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4 Flash

Source: r/LocalLLaMA | 2026-08-06