Cisco vs Nokia

Small Language Models: When Smaller Is Better

This MLPills newsletter issue explains small language models (SLMs) — compact AI models designed to run under resource constraints such as limited memory, power, and latency budgets. It clarifies that 'small' is a comparative concept rather than a specific parameter count, and distinguishes SLMs from quantized frontier models and distillation. The article covers four main routes to building SLMs: curated data training, distillation, pruning, and quantization, and highlights examples including Microsoft's Phi-4 family, Google's Gemma 3n and Gemma 4 edge models, Hugging Face's SmolLM3, and Cisco's Antares vulnerability-localization models. It describes ideal use cases like classification, entity extraction, and tool selection, and recommends a layered architecture using deterministic code, small models, large models, and human oversight. The piece also cautions about evaluation, over-pruning, and privacy limitations of local inference.

• A 4B parameter model at 4-bit precision needs roughly 2 GB of memory; the same model at 16-bit needs roughly 8 GB.
• Microsoft's Phi-4 is a 14B parameter model, with a 3.8B Phi-4-Mini sibling and a Phi-4-Multimodal variant.
• Google's Gemma 3n models used per-layer embeddings, KV cache sharing, and activation quantization to reduce memory footprints.

Nokia launches industry-first initiative to help operators accelerate network innovation in the AI era

Nokia launches industry-first initiative to help operators accelerate network innovation in the AI era (September 08, 2026). Also new: Nokia opens R&D center in Saudi Arabia, and Indosat, Ooredoo Group, Nokia, and NVIDIA launch Zankore AI infra platform.

Finnish DSP Specialist Readpeak Expands into the US

Finnish adtech provider Readpeak has expanded its business to the United States, opening a New York office in early September. This marks the company's first location outside Europe, following market entries into Italy and Poland during the summer. Readpeak has already connected 150 premium publishers in the US and cites the more transactional nature of the US media market as a key reason for the expansion. To support international growth, the company has appointed Sami Pippuri as CTO and Martin Garfalk as VP Sales Europe. The team in Europe is also growing, with Fabian Ritter joining as Senior Publisher Account Manager for the DACH region. Readpeak, founded in 2014, operates a DSP for native advertising, reaching over 200 million monthly users across 2,000+ premium news sites in Europe.

• Readpeak opened a New York office in September 2026, its first outside Europe.
• The company entered the Italian and Polish markets in July 2026.
• Sami Pippuri was appointed CTO, Martin Garfalk VP Sales Europe, and Fabian Ritter Senior Publisher Account Manager DACH.