Qwen Series of Models

The Qwen series of models comes from Alibaba Cloud.  The Qwen 3.5 models, released in early 2026, has set new records for sub 2B models. It is much smaller than gpt-oss.

IBM's Guide to Small Language Models

IBM have made a guide to SLMs.

Examples SLMs listed as:

• DistilBERT (DistilBERT is Google's groundbreaking BERT model in "distilled" form (hence the name "Distilled BERT"), retaining 97% of BERT's NLU abilities)
• Gemma
• GPT-4o mini
• Granite
• Llama
• Ministral
• Phi