- In February 2025, Microsoft expanded its footprint in the SLM market with the launch of the Phi-4 series, including Phi-4-mini-instruct and Phi-4-multimodal. These models offer enhanced capabilities in reasoning, multilingual understanding, and coding, making them ideal for both enterprise and developer use. Their availability across platforms such as Hugging Face, Azure AI Foundry, and Ollama is expected to significantly broaden user access and accelerate adoption across various sectors
- In February 2025, IBM expanded its Granite model lineup to include multimodal and reasoning-focused models aimed at enterprise applications. With Granite Multimodal and Granite Reasoning, IBM is addressing a critical need for interpretable and logic-capable AI, potentially capturing a larger share of the enterprise-focused segment of the SLM market. These tools are designed for seamless integration and responsible adoption, enhancing AI-driven decision-making and automation
- In January 2025, Arcee AI strengthened its competitive position by releasing two new SLMs—Virtuoso-Lite and Virtuoso-Medium-v2—based on DeepSeek-V3. These models, especially Virtuoso-Medium-v2, which outperformed Arcee’s previous benchmarks, enhance performance in math and code applications. Their advanced architecture and proprietary techniques are likely to push innovation in academic and technical use cases within the SLM market
- In November 2024, Amazon reinforced its presence in the AI space by investing an additional USD 4 billion in Anthropic. This move, coupled with AWS Trainium-powered training for Claude models such as Claude 3.5 Haiku and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, underscores Amazon's ambition to lead in high-performance agentic models. The Claude series’ strong performance in coding tasks positions it as a major contributor to the commercial SLM landscape, especially in developer-focused applications
- In April 2024, Microsoft introduced ‘Phi-3-mini,’ a lightweight AI model aimed at bringing advanced language capabilities to a broader range of users at a lower cost. By making it available through platforms such as Microsoft Azure AI Model Catalog, Hugging Face, Ollama, and NVIDIA NIM, Microsoft is strengthening its position in the Small Language Model (SLM) market. This launch marks the beginning of its open SLM series, significantly enhancing accessibility and encouraging widespread adoption across industries
