Building Cost-Effective and Auditable AI Systems with Small Language Models and RAG

Summary

The New Stack published an article advocating for the use of Small Language Models (SLMs) combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) as a practical architecture for enterprises seeking cheaper, safer, and more auditable AI deployments. The piece argues that not every use case requires the scale and cost of large frontier models, and that SLMs paired with RAG pipelines can deliver domain-specific accuracy while maintaining traceability of outputs back to source documents. This approach d