A workhorse model is a model that is deeply specialized.
This is a list of purpose-built, open-weight small language (and multimodal) models that enterprises actually use for one thing—and do it extremely well. General-purpose models and models released before 2025 are not allowed.
As enterprises productionize AI, narrowly focused SLMs often beat general models on accuracy, latency, cost, and control for a given task (extraction, safety, coding agents, search). This list highlights those specialists with real-world traction and open weights.
- Specialized: Excels at a narrow, well-defined task (extraction, safety, coding, embeddings/rerankers, etc.)
- Open weights: Training code/datasets optional but welcome
- Enterprise adoption: Public deployments, marketplace entries, enterprise docs, or similar signals
- 2025+ only: Initial release (or major refresh) in 2025 or later
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Taking notes on the specialized language models that actually have companies publicly using them. Only including models with concrete adoption evidence, not just platform listings. Focused on real enterprise deployments.
| Model | Companies Actually Using It | Proof of Usage | Blog/Coverage | Key Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ClipTagger-12B (Aug. 2025) | Grass / Wynd Labs | Launch PRs: BusinessWire, Yahoo Finance; Product page: Inference.net model | • Official launch blog • Grass launch post • HYPER.AI coverage |
Image captioning model trained on 1M video frames |
| ReaderLM-v2 (Jul. 2025) | Jina AI / Google Cloud | • Jina model: ReaderLM-v2, Hugging Face • Jina Reader API uses ReaderLM-v2: docs • Google Cloud Run production case study: GCP blog |
• Jina announcement | HTML-to-Markdown conversion used in production by Jina and scaled on Google Cloud |
| Foundation-Sec-8B (Cisco) (Apr.–Aug. 2025) | Cisco / Splunk | • Cisco blog: Foundation-sec-8B reasoning model • Splunk blog: Accelerating Security Operations |
• Cisco overview | Cybersecurity model with real SOC deployment by Splunk |
| ShieldGemma 2 (Mar. 2025) | Google/Vertex AI / Hugging Face | • Vertex docs: Models page, ShieldGemma 2 docs • Release: Gemma releases (Feb 19, 2025) |
• Google AI dev docs | Safety classifier used by Google themselves in their AI stack |
| Llama Guard 4 (Apr. 2025) | Databricks / Groq | • Databricks Marketplace: Llama Guard Model • Groq Cloud catalog: meta-llama/llama-guard-4-12b |
• HF blog "Welcoming Llama Guard 4" • Model card |
Safety guardrails used by major cloud/AI platforms |
| Qwen3-Coder (Jul.–Sep. 2025) | Google Cloud (Vertex AI) / Tinfoil | • Vertex AI: Qwen3 Coder in Model Garden, Qwen3 Coder docs • Tinfoil: launch blog, changelog |
• Qwen announcement | Coding model with enterprise API integration by Tinfoil |
| Schematron-8B / 3B (2025) | Inference.net / Hugging Face | • Inference.net: Schematron serverless API, JSON extraction docs • Hugging Face: Schematron models collection |
• Schematron launch blog • JSON extraction use case |
Schema-driven HTML-to-JSON extraction models with 128k context; 40x-80x cheaper than GPT-5 for large-scale web scraping |
| SWE-grep (Oct. 2025) | Cognition (Devin) / Windsurf | • Cognition: Fast Context subagent deployment • Windsurf: Agentic IDE now powered by SWE-grep |
• Introducing SWE-grep & SWE-grep-mini • Hacker News discussion |
RL-trained code retrieval agent delivering order-of-magnitude faster context gathering for coding assistants |
| SWE-grep-mini (Oct. 2025) | Cognition (Devin) / Windsurf Fast Context Playground | • Cognition: Mini variant serving 2,800 tok/s Fast Context • Windsurf playground: Hands-on deployment |
• Introducing SWE-grep & SWE-grep-mini • RL for Fast Multi-Turn Context Retrieval |
Distilled fast-retrieval model optimized for parallel search with enterprise-grade latency |