Best Small Language Models in China
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Compare the Top Small Language Models in China as of August 2026
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What are Small Language Models in China?
Small Language Models (SLMs) are compact AI models designed to perform natural language understanding and generation tasks while requiring significantly fewer computational resources than large language models (LLMs). These models are optimized for low latency, lower memory usage, on-device inference, and cost-efficient deployment, making them well suited for edge devices, mobile applications, embedded systems, and enterprise workloads with strict performance or privacy requirements. SLMs can power applications such as chatbots, document summarization, code generation, classification, translation, question answering, and AI agents while delivering fast inference and reduced infrastructure costs. Many small language models are available as open-source or commercial offerings and integrate with AI frameworks, inference engines, cloud platforms, and developer tools for flexible deployment. By balancing performance, efficiency, and scalability, small language models help organizations build responsive, cost-effective AI applications across a wide range of environments. Compare and read user reviews of the best Small Language Models in China currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
Mistral AI
Mistral AI
Mistral AI is a pioneering artificial intelligence startup specializing in open-source generative AI. The company offers a range of customizable, enterprise-grade AI solutions deployable across various platforms, including on-premises, cloud, edge, and devices. Flagship products include "Le Chat," a multilingual AI assistant designed to enhance productivity in both personal and professional contexts, and "La Plateforme," a developer platform that enables the creation and deployment of AI-powered applications. Committed to transparency and innovation, Mistral AI positions itself as a leading independent AI lab, contributing significantly to open-source AI and policy development.Starting Price: Free -
2
Inkling-Small
Thinking Machines Lab
Inkling-Small is an efficient model that offers performance comparable to Inkling at a quarter of its size. It is a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 276 billion total parameters and 12 billion active parameters, trained on NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems. It supports native reasoning across text, images, and audio, variable thinking effort, and context windows of up to one million tokens. Users adjust reasoning effort from minimal to extra high to balance performance and compute. Improved pre-training data, post-training with on-policy distillation from Inkling, and extended agentic coding reinforcement learning helped Inkling-Small surpass its larger counterpart on reasoning and coding benchmarks. It performs well in coding and tool-use harnesses, exceeds 80% on SWE-bench Verified, and combines strong reasoning with efficient output. Its encoder-free multimodal architecture processes audio as dMel spectrograms and images as 40-by-40-pixel patches alongside text tokens.Starting Price: $0.30 per million input tokens -
3
GPT-4o mini
OpenAI
A small model with superior textual intelligence and multimodal reasoning. GPT-4o mini enables a broad range of tasks with its low cost and latency, such as applications that chain or parallelize multiple model calls (e.g., calling multiple APIs), pass a large volume of context to the model (e.g., full code base or conversation history), or interact with customers through fast, real-time text responses (e.g., customer support chatbots). Today, GPT-4o mini supports text and vision in the API, with support for text, image, video and audio inputs and outputs coming in the future. The model has a context window of 128K tokens, supports up to 16K output tokens per request, and has knowledge up to October 2023. Thanks to the improved tokenizer shared with GPT-4o, handling non-English text is now even more cost effective. -
4
Gemini Flash
Google
Gemini Flash is an advanced large language model (LLM) from Google, specifically designed for high-speed, low-latency language processing tasks. Part of Google DeepMind’s Gemini series, Gemini Flash is tailored to provide real-time responses and handle large-scale applications, making it ideal for interactive AI-driven experiences such as customer support, virtual assistants, and live chat solutions. Despite its speed, Gemini Flash doesn’t compromise on quality; it’s built on sophisticated neural architectures that ensure responses remain contextually relevant, coherent, and precise. Google has incorporated rigorous ethical frameworks and responsible AI practices into Gemini Flash, equipping it with guardrails to manage and mitigate biased outputs, ensuring it aligns with Google’s standards for safe and inclusive AI. With Gemini Flash, Google empowers businesses and developers to deploy responsive, intelligent language tools that can meet the demands of fast-paced environments. -
5
Gemma 4
Google
Gemma 4 is an AI model introduced by Google and built on the Gemini architecture to deliver improved performance and flexibility. The model is designed to run efficiently on a single GPU or TPU, making it more accessible to developers and researchers. Gemma 4 enhances capabilities in natural language understanding and text generation, supporting a wide range of AI-driven applications. Its architecture allows it to handle complex tasks while maintaining efficient resource usage. Developers can use the model to build applications that rely on advanced language processing and automation. The design emphasizes scalability so that it can support both smaller projects and larger AI systems. By combining efficiency with powerful language capabilities, Gemma 4 helps advance the development of modern AI solutions.Starting Price: Free -
6
OpenAI o1-mini
OpenAI
OpenAI o1-mini is a new, cost-effective AI model designed for enhanced reasoning, particularly excelling in STEM fields like mathematics and coding. It's part of the o1 series, which focuses on solving complex problems by spending more time "thinking" through solutions. Despite being smaller and 80% cheaper than its sibling, the o1-preview, o1-mini performs competitively in coding tasks and mathematical reasoning, making it an accessible option for developers and enterprises looking for efficient AI solutions. -
7
Gemini 2.0 Flash
Google
The Gemini 2.0 Flash AI model represents the next generation of high-speed, intelligent computing, designed to set new benchmarks in real-time language processing and decision-making. Building on the robust foundation of its predecessor, it incorporates enhanced neural architecture and breakthrough advancements in optimization, enabling even faster and more accurate responses. Gemini 2.0 Flash is designed for applications requiring instantaneous processing and adaptability, such as live virtual assistants, automated trading systems, and real-time analytics. Its lightweight, efficient design ensures seamless deployment across cloud, edge, and hybrid environments, while its improved contextual understanding and multitasking capabilities make it a versatile tool for tackling complex, dynamic workflows with precision and speed. -
8
Gemini Nano
Google
Gemini Nano from Google is a lightweight, energy-efficient AI model designed for high performance in compact, resource-constrained environments. Tailored for edge computing and mobile applications, Gemini Nano combines Google's advanced AI architecture with cutting-edge optimization techniques to deliver seamless performance without compromising speed or accuracy. Despite its compact size, it excels in tasks like voice recognition, natural language processing, real-time translation, and personalized recommendations. With a focus on privacy and efficiency, Gemini Nano processes data locally, minimizing reliance on cloud infrastructure while maintaining robust security. Its adaptability and low power consumption make it an ideal choice for smart devices, IoT ecosystems, and on-the-go AI solutions. -
9
Gemini 1.5 Flash
Google
The Gemini 1.5 Flash AI model is an advanced, high-speed language model engineered for lightning-fast processing and real-time responsiveness. Designed to excel in dynamic and time-sensitive applications, it combines streamlined neural architecture with cutting-edge optimization techniques to deliver exceptional performance without compromising on accuracy. Gemini 1.5 Flash is tailored for scenarios requiring rapid data processing, instant decision-making, and seamless multitasking, making it ideal for chatbots, customer support systems, and interactive applications. Its lightweight yet powerful design ensures it can be deployed efficiently across a range of platforms, from cloud-based environments to edge devices, enabling businesses to scale their operations with unmatched agility. -
10
Mistral 7B
Mistral AI
Mistral 7B is a 7.3-billion-parameter language model that outperforms larger models like Llama 2 13B across various benchmarks. It employs Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) for faster inference and Sliding Window Attention (SWA) to efficiently handle longer sequences. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, Mistral 7B is accessible for deployment across diverse platforms, including local environments and major cloud services. Additionally, a fine-tuned version, Mistral 7B Instruct, demonstrates enhanced performance in instruction-following tasks, surpassing models like Llama 2 13B Chat.Starting Price: Free -
11
Mistral NeMo
Mistral AI
Mistral NeMo, our new best small model. A state-of-the-art 12B model with 128k context length, and released under the Apache 2.0 license. Mistral NeMo is a 12B model built in collaboration with NVIDIA. Mistral NeMo offers a large context window of up to 128k tokens. Its reasoning, world knowledge, and coding accuracy are state-of-the-art in its size category. As it relies on standard architecture, Mistral NeMo is easy to use and a drop-in replacement in any system using Mistral 7B. We have released pre-trained base and instruction-tuned checkpoints under the Apache 2.0 license to promote adoption for researchers and enterprises. Mistral NeMo was trained with quantization awareness, enabling FP8 inference without any performance loss. The model is designed for global, multilingual applications. It is trained on function calling and has a large context window. Compared to Mistral 7B, it is much better at following precise instructions, reasoning, and handling multi-turn conversations.Starting Price: Free -
12
Ministral 3B
Mistral AI
Mistral AI introduced two state-of-the-art models for on-device computing and edge use cases, named "les Ministraux": Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B. These models set a new frontier in knowledge, commonsense reasoning, function-calling, and efficiency in the sub-10B category. They can be used or tuned for various applications, from orchestrating agentic workflows to creating specialist task workers. Both models support up to 128k context length (currently 32k on vLLM), and Ministral 8B features a special interleaved sliding-window attention pattern for faster and memory-efficient inference. These models were built to provide a compute-efficient and low-latency solution for scenarios such as on-device translation, internet-less smart assistants, local analytics, and autonomous robotics. Used in conjunction with larger language models like Mistral Large, les Ministraux also serve as efficient intermediaries for function-calling in multi-step agentic workflows.Starting Price: Free -
13
Ministral 8B
Mistral AI
Mistral AI has introduced two advanced models for on-device computing and edge applications, named "les Ministraux": Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B. These models excel in knowledge, commonsense reasoning, function-calling, and efficiency within the sub-10B parameter range. They support up to 128k context length and are designed for various applications, including on-device translation, offline smart assistants, local analytics, and autonomous robotics. Ministral 8B features an interleaved sliding-window attention pattern for faster and more memory-efficient inference. Both models can function as intermediaries in multi-step agentic workflows, handling tasks like input parsing, task routing, and API calls based on user intent with low latency and cost. Benchmark evaluations indicate that les Ministraux consistently outperforms comparable models across multiple tasks. As of October 16, 2024, both models are available, with Ministral 8B priced at $0.1 per million tokens.Starting Price: Free -
14
Mistral Small
Mistral AI
On September 17, 2024, Mistral AI announced several key updates to enhance the accessibility and performance of their AI offerings. They introduced a free tier on "La Plateforme," their serverless platform for tuning and deploying Mistral models as API endpoints, enabling developers to experiment and prototype at no cost. Additionally, Mistral AI reduced prices across their entire model lineup, with significant cuts such as a 50% reduction for Mistral Nemo and an 80% decrease for Mistral Small and Codestral, making advanced AI more cost-effective for users. The company also unveiled Mistral Small v24.09, a 22-billion-parameter model offering a balance between performance and efficiency, suitable for tasks like translation, summarization, and sentiment analysis. Furthermore, they made Pixtral 12B, a vision-capable model with image understanding capabilities, freely available on "Le Chat," allowing users to analyze and caption images without compromising text-based performance.Starting Price: Free -
15
GPT-J
EleutherAI
GPT-J is a cutting-edge language model created by the research organization EleutherAI. In terms of performance, GPT-J exhibits a level of proficiency comparable to that of OpenAI's renowned GPT-3 model in a range of zero-shot tasks. Notably, GPT-J has demonstrated the ability to surpass GPT-3 in tasks related to generating code. The latest iteration of this language model, known as GPT-J-6B, is built upon a linguistic dataset referred to as The Pile. This dataset, which is publicly available, encompasses a substantial volume of 825 gibibytes of language data, organized into 22 distinct subsets. While GPT-J shares certain capabilities with ChatGPT, it is important to note that GPT-J is not designed to operate as a chatbot; rather, its primary function is to predict text. In a significant development in March 2023, Databricks introduced Dolly, a model that follows instructions and is licensed under Apache.Starting Price: Free -
16
Falcon-7B
Technology Innovation Institute (TII)
Falcon-7B is a 7B parameters causal decoder-only model built by TII and trained on 1,500B tokens of RefinedWeb enhanced with curated corpora. It is made available under the Apache 2.0 license. Why use Falcon-7B? It outperforms comparable open-source models (e.g., MPT-7B, StableLM, RedPajama etc.), thanks to being trained on 1,500B tokens of RefinedWeb enhanced with curated corpora. See the OpenLLM Leaderboard. It features an architecture optimized for inference, with FlashAttention and multiquery. It is made available under a permissive Apache 2.0 license allowing for commercial use, without any royalties or restrictions.Starting Price: Free -
17
Llama 3
Meta
We’ve integrated Llama 3 into Meta AI, our intelligent assistant, that expands the ways people can get things done, create and connect with Meta AI. You can see first-hand the performance of Llama 3 by using Meta AI for coding tasks and problem solving. Whether you're developing agents, or other AI-powered applications, Llama 3 in both 8B and 70B will offer the capabilities and flexibility you need to develop your ideas. With the release of Llama 3, we’ve updated the Responsible Use Guide (RUG) to provide the most comprehensive information on responsible development with LLMs. Our system-centric approach includes updates to our trust and safety tools with Llama Guard 2, optimized to support the newly announced taxonomy published by MLCommons expanding its coverage to a more comprehensive set of safety categories, code shield, and Cybersec Eval 2.Starting Price: Free -
18
Llama 3.1
Meta
The open source AI model you can fine-tune, distill and deploy anywhere. Our latest instruction-tuned model is available in 8B, 70B and 405B versions. Using our open ecosystem, build faster with a selection of differentiated product offerings to support your use cases. Choose from real-time inference or batch inference services. Download model weights to further optimize cost per token. Adapt for your application, improve with synthetic data and deploy on-prem or in the cloud. Use Llama system components and extend the model using zero shot tool use and RAG to build agentic behaviors. Leverage 405B high quality data to improve specialized models for specific use cases.Starting Price: Free -
19
Llama 3.2
Meta
The open-source AI model you can fine-tune, distill and deploy anywhere is now available in more versions. Choose from 1B, 3B, 11B or 90B, or continue building with Llama 3.1. Llama 3.2 is a collection of large language models (LLMs) pretrained and fine-tuned in 1B and 3B sizes that are multilingual text only, and 11B and 90B sizes that take both text and image inputs and output text. Develop highly performative and efficient applications from our latest release. Use our 1B or 3B models for on device applications such as summarizing a discussion from your phone or calling on-device tools like calendar. Use our 11B or 90B models for image use cases such as transforming an existing image into something new or getting more information from an image of your surroundings.Starting Price: Free -
20
Arcee-SuperNova
Arcee.ai
Arcee-SuperNova is a small Language Model (SLM) with all the power and performance of leading closed-source LLMs. Excels at generalized tasks, instruction-following, and human preferences. The best 70B model on the market. SuperNova can be utilized for any generalized task, much like Open AI’s GPT4o, Claude Sonnet 3.5, and Cohere. Trained with the most advanced learning & optimization techniques, SuperNova generates highly accurate responses in human-like text. It's the most flexible, secure, and cost-effective language model on the market, saving customers up to 95% on total deployment costs vs. traditional closed-source models. Use SuperNova to integrate AI into apps and products, for general chat purposes, and for diverse use cases. Regularly update your models with the latest open-source tech, ensuring you're never locked into any one solution. Protect your data with industry-leading privacy measures.Starting Price: Free -
21
Llama 3.3
Meta
Llama 3.3 is the latest iteration in the Llama series of language models, developed to push the boundaries of AI-powered understanding and communication. With enhanced contextual reasoning, improved language generation, and advanced fine-tuning capabilities, Llama 3.3 is designed to deliver highly accurate, human-like responses across diverse applications. This version features a larger training dataset, refined algorithms for nuanced comprehension, and reduced biases compared to its predecessors. Llama 3.3 excels in tasks such as natural language understanding, creative writing, technical explanation, and multilingual communication, making it an indispensable tool for businesses, developers, and researchers. Its modular architecture allows for customizable deployment in specialized domains, ensuring versatility and performance at scale.Starting Price: Free -
22
SmolLM2
Hugging Face
SmolLM2 is a collection of state-of-the-art, compact language models developed for on-device applications. The models in this collection range from 1.7B parameters to smaller 360M and 135M versions, designed to perform efficiently even on less powerful hardware. These models excel in text generation tasks and are optimized for real-time, low-latency applications, providing high-quality results across various use cases, including content creation, coding assistance, and natural language processing. SmolLM2's flexibility makes it a suitable choice for developers looking to integrate powerful AI into mobile devices, edge computing, and other resource-constrained environments.Starting Price: Free -
23
Gemma 3
Google
Gemma 3, introduced by Google, is a new AI model built on the Gemini 2.0 architecture, designed to offer enhanced performance and versatility. This model is capable of running efficiently on a single GPU or TPU, making it accessible for a wide range of developers and researchers. Gemma 3 focuses on improving natural language understanding, generation, and other AI-driven tasks. By offering scalable, powerful AI capabilities, Gemma 3 aims to advance the development of AI systems across various industries and use cases.Starting Price: Free -
24
Mistral Small 3.1
Mistral
Mistral Small 3.1 is a state-of-the-art, multimodal, and multilingual AI model released under the Apache 2.0 license. Building upon Mistral Small 3, this enhanced version offers improved text performance, and advanced multimodal understanding, and supports an expanded context window of up to 128,000 tokens. It outperforms comparable models like Gemma 3 and GPT-4o Mini, delivering inference speeds of 150 tokens per second. Designed for versatility, Mistral Small 3.1 excels in tasks such as instruction following, conversational assistance, image understanding, and function calling, making it suitable for both enterprise and consumer-grade AI applications. Its lightweight architecture allows it to run efficiently on a single RTX 4090 or a Mac with 32GB RAM, facilitating on-device deployments. It is available for download on Hugging Face, accessible via Mistral AI's developer playground, and integrated into platforms likeGemini Enterprise Agent Platform, with availability on NVIDIA NIM.Starting Price: Free -
25
Llama 4 Scout
Meta
Llama 4 Scout is a powerful 17 billion active parameter multimodal AI model that excels in both text and image processing. With an industry-leading context length of 10 million tokens, it outperforms its predecessors, including Llama 3, in tasks such as multi-document summarization and parsing large codebases. Llama 4 Scout is designed to handle complex reasoning tasks while maintaining high efficiency, making it perfect for use cases requiring long-context comprehension and image grounding. It offers cutting-edge performance in image-related tasks and is particularly well-suited for applications requiring both text and visual understanding.Starting Price: Free -
26
GPT-5 mini
OpenAI
GPT-5 mini is a streamlined, faster, and more affordable variant of OpenAI’s GPT-5, optimized for well-defined tasks and precise prompts. It supports text and image inputs and delivers high-quality text outputs with a 400,000-token context window and up to 128,000 output tokens. This model excels at rapid response times, making it suitable for applications requiring fast, accurate language understanding without the full overhead of GPT-5. Pricing is cost-effective, with input tokens at $0.25 per million and output tokens at $2 per million, providing savings over the flagship model. GPT-5 mini supports advanced features like streaming, function calling, structured outputs, and fine-tuning, but does not support audio input or image generation. It integrates well with various API endpoints including chat completions, responses, and embeddings, making it versatile for many AI-powered tasks.Starting Price: $0.25 per 1M tokens -
27
GPT-5 nano
OpenAI
GPT-5 nano is OpenAI’s fastest and most affordable version of the GPT-5 family, designed for high-speed text processing tasks like summarization and classification. It supports text and image inputs, generating high-quality text outputs with a large 400,000-token context window and up to 128,000 output tokens. GPT-5 nano offers very fast response times, making it ideal for applications requiring quick turnaround without sacrificing quality. Pricing is extremely competitive, with input tokens costing $0.05 per million and output tokens $0.40 per million, making it accessible for budget-conscious projects. The model supports advanced API features such as streaming, function calling, structured outputs, and fine-tuning. While it supports image input, it does not handle audio input or web search, focusing on core text tasks efficiently.Starting Price: $0.05 per 1M tokens -
28
Claude Haiku 4.5
Anthropic
Anthropic has launched Claude Haiku 4.5, its latest small-language model designed to deliver near-frontier performance at significantly lower cost. The model provides similar coding and reasoning quality as the company’s mid-tier Sonnet 4, yet it runs at roughly one-third of the cost and more than twice the speed. In benchmarks cited by Anthropic, Haiku 4.5 meets or exceeds Sonnet 4’s performance in key tasks such as code generation and multi-step “computer use” workflows. It is optimized for real-time, low-latency scenarios such as chat assistants, customer service agents, and pair-programming support. Haiku 4.5 is made available via the Claude API under the identifier “claude-haiku-4-5” and supports large-scale deployments where cost, responsiveness, and near-frontier intelligence matter. Claude Haiku 4.5 is available now on Claude Code and our apps. Its efficiency means you can accomplish more within your usage limits while maintaining premium model performance.Starting Price: $1 per million input tokens -
29
Ministral 3
Mistral AI
Mistral 3 is the latest generation of open-weight AI models from Mistral AI, offering a full family of models, from small, edge-optimized versions to a flagship, large-scale multimodal model. The lineup includes three compact “Ministral 3” models (3B, 8B, and 14B parameters) designed for efficiency and deployment on constrained hardware (even laptops, drones, or edge devices), plus the powerful “Mistral Large 3,” a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 675 billion total parameters (41 billion active). The models support multimodal and multilingual tasks, not only text, but also image understanding, and have demonstrated best-in-class performance on general prompts, multilingual conversations, and multimodal inputs. The base and instruction-fine-tuned versions are released under the Apache 2.0 license, enabling broad customization and integration in enterprise and open source projects.Starting Price: Free -
30
GLM-4.5V-Flash
Zhipu AI
GLM-4.5V-Flash is an open source vision-language model, designed to bring strong multimodal capabilities into a lightweight, deployable package. It supports image, video, document, and GUI inputs, enabling tasks such as scene understanding, chart and document parsing, screen reading, and multi-image analysis. Compared to larger models in the series, GLM-4.5V-Flash offers a compact footprint while retaining core VLM capabilities like visual reasoning, video understanding, GUI task handling, and complex document parsing. It can serve in “GUI agent” workflows, meaning it can interpret screenshots or desktop captures, recognize icons or UI elements, and assist with automated desktop or web-based tasks. Although it forgoes some of the largest-model performance gains, GLM-4.5V-Flash remains versatile for real-world multimodal tasks where efficiency, lower resource usage, and broad modality support are prioritized.Starting Price: Free
