Global competition in lightweight model Works without Internet or GPU

‘Small but powerful artificial intelligence (AI)’ that can be stored and used on smartphone or computers (PCs and laptops) without Wi-Fi or an internet connection is emerging. LG Electronics’ new laptop LG Gram, which was released this year, is also equipped with a lightweight model of the AI model, ‘EXAONE 3.5.’ Even a micro-sized model that can be stored on floppy disks, a storage medium used 30 years ago, has emerged overseas.

According to the information technology (IT) industry, LFM 2.5 1.2B, a model for edge introduced by a U.S. AI startup Liquid AI earlier this month, is drawing keen attention with more than 50,000 downloads within just ten days of its release on the open-source platform Hugging Face.
This model outperforms similar models from Alibaba and Meta, yet is micro-sized enough to store on a 750MB floppy disk.
The most significant feature of this micro-sized model is that it can run on local devices like smartphones or PCs used by ordinary users. Unlike the latest model of OpenAI and Google, which require a massive amount of GPU resources, this model is optimized to be run by a GPU or a neural processing unit (NPU) in the device.
The use of micro-sized models is also on the rise in Korea. LG Electronics has installed EXAONE 3.5, a model developed by LG’s AI Research Institute, in the 2026 LG Gram released earlier this year.
Based on EXAONE 3.5, LG gram offers features that can summarize using AI without network connection and search and answer by creating a database using data stored on a PC.
Kakao’s on-device AI feature, Kanana in KakaoTalk, which will be fully applied to KakaoTalk in the first quarter of this year, also utilizes a micro-sized model. Kanana in KakaoTalk is used to analyze a user’s conversation to suggest customized questions or to identify a user’s schedules and notify the user.

 
 
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