Hugging Face has released SmolLM2, a new family of compact language models designed to run on smartphones and edge devices with limited processing power and memory. The models, released under the Apache 2.0 license, come in three sizes up to 1.7B parameters and achieve impressive performance on key benchmarks, outperforming larger models like Meta’s Llama 1B. According to Hugging Face’s model documentation, “SmolLM2 demonstrates significant advances over its predecessor, particularly in instruction following, knowledge, reasoning and mathematics.” The release points to a growing trend of developing efficient, lightweight AI models that can run locally on devices, making advanced AI capabilities more accessible to smaller companies and independent developers. Source: VentureBeat