Winning Big With Small AI

Winning Big With Small AI

Mark Watson
Buy on Leanpub
Table of Contents

Winning Big With Small AI

  • Preface
    • Choosing Which “Small AI” Tools to Use in This Book
  • Part I - Advantages of Small AI With Examples
  • Advantages of Small Models with Examples That Might Surprise You
    • The Great Divergence: Redefining Intelligence in the Post-Scale Era
    • The Cloud Efficiency Champion: Anatomy of Gemini 3 Flash
    • The Local Insurgency: Qwen 3 and other Local Models Provide Democratization of Reasoning
    • The Physics of Thought: Theoretical Mechanisms
    • Sovereignty and Solvency: The Economic and Legal Case
    • Surprising Realities: Case Studies
    • Horizon 2026: The Future of Distributed Intelligence
  • Drawbacks of Small AI
    • Reduced Reasoning Depth and Nuance
    • Higher Propensity for Hallucination
    • Limited Context Window and Memory Management
    • Fragility in Prompt Following
    • Security and Support Disparities
    • Wrap Up for Drawbacks of Small AI
  • Part II - Defining Metrics for Success Using LLMs
  • Defining Metrics for Success Using LLMs
    • Operational Metrics: The Small AI Advantage
    • Quality Metrics: The “LLM-as-a-Judge” Pattern
    • RAG Metrics: The Trinity of Trust
    • Deterministic Guardrails
    • The Golden Ratio: Accuracy per Watt
    • Code Example: The Judge Pattern
    • Wrap Up for LLM Metrics
  • A Fair Shootout: Evaluating Large vs. Small Models for Task Fitness
    • The Setup for RAG: David vs. Goliath
    • Fairness: Adjusting Problem Setups for Small vs. Large Models
    • Comparing Small vs. Large Models for NLP and Extracting Structured Data From Text
    • Wrap Up for Evaluating Large vs. Small Models for Task Fitness
  • Part III - Python Examples for Switching Between Models
  • Using the LiteLLM Library to Easily Switch Between Models and Model Providers
    • Tool Use with LiteLLM
    • LiteLLM Wrap Up
  • Automatically Routing to the ‘Best’ Model Using RouteLLM Library
    • Implementation of a Command Line Query Utility Using RouteLLM
  • Wrap Up for Winning Big With Small AI
    • The Engineering Reality: From Vibes to Metrics
    • The Architecture of Hybrid Intelligence
    • The “Fitness for Purpose” Philosophy
    • Sovereignty, Solvency, and Sustainability
    • Final Recommendations for Your Journey
Winning Big With Small AI/