Hands-On Small Language Models

Chapter 1. Getting Started

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In the last chapter we talked about what Small Language models are, what makes them different from large language models, and how we can think about them when incorporating them into applications. In this chapter, we will prepare for the project that will work as a throughline of this book. We will install the software and libraries, acquire the data, and set up the environment for the project.

Project: Theοros

θεωρός

• spectator, envoy at a festival [1]

• envoy sent to consult an oracle [2]

Throughout this book, we’ll use an agentic system for searching for movies, learning about movies, and other movie-related tools. I decided to use movies for a few reasons. First of all, the data does not require special security, since there is no personally identifying information. This is all publicly available data. This means that we can focus on learning about using SLMs with agentic applications. That being said, for many real life use cases, this will not be the case. Another reason is that it does not require special domain knowledge, ...