foreword
It is truly an honor to receive a request to write a foreword for a book like this, in this particular space, at this specific time in history, and by an author who I believe will make significant contributions to this industry during his tenure. That book is Domain-Specific Small Language Models, the space is generative AI, the time in history is the tremendous evolutionary acceleration of AI, and the author is Guglielmo Iozzia.
In an era when AI discourse is dominated by ever-larger frontier models and eye-catching demos, this book takes a refreshingly pragmatic stance: it is about making language models actually work for your domain, your data, and your hardware constraints. It is written with the practitioner’s learning curve squarely in mind, moving from foundational concepts to hands-on experience so that by the time you turn the last page, you will not only understand why small, domain-specific language models matter, you will have run them, tuned them, optimized them, and deployed them on real-world infrastructure.