The “hype” of giant models (like GPT-5) is giving way to the pragmatism of specialized models. Companies are realizing that for business, size doesn’t matter.
The Problem with Generalists
A model trained on “the entire internet” is great for writing poems, but dangerous for giving specific legal or medical advice. It hallucinates because it tries to fill gaps with probability, not technical facts.
The Solution: Small Language Models (SLMs)
Domain-Specific Models are trained (or fine-tuned) exclusively on data from an industry or company.
- Legal: Trained on 50 years of local case law.
- Medical: Trained on hospital diagnoses and protocols.
- Engineering: Trained on technical manuals and safety standards.
Competitive Advantages
- Accuracy: Less hallucination, more facts.
- Privacy: Can run locally (on-premise), without sending industrial secrets to OpenAI or Google.
- Cost: Much cheaper and faster to run.
In 2026, the question isn’t “which LLM do you use?”, but “how well-trained is your LLM?”.
