Module 8 · Model Types

Lesson 13The Model Zoo

6 topics17 min readTopics 62–67

Welcome to Module 8: Model Types — a fast, high-density tour of the zoo. Six species: VLMs (how images become tokens), SLMs (why small became a strategy rather than a compromise), dense and MoE architectures taught together, coding models, and reasoning models. Watch for the pattern: every exotic species here decomposes into fundamentals you already own.

In this lesson

  1. 62VLMshow images become tokensA transformer processes a sequence of vectors. It does not care what those vectors originally were. That single fact is the whole of…3 min
  2. 63SLMssmall as a strategySmall Language Models — roughly 0.5B to 14B parameters, runnable on consumer hardware — used to be understood as "big models, but worse."…3 min
  3. 64Dense Modelsthe honest baselineA short but load-bearing topic. A dense model is one where every parameter participates in every token's forward pass — every FFN neuron…2 min
  4. 65MoEthe warehouse with a triage deskMixture of Experts answers Topic 64's closing question with surgical precision. The surgery site is exactly where you'd predict: the FFNs —…4 min
  5. 66Coding Modelswhere the world grades homeworkWhy did code become the field's favorite domain — the place where models improved fastest and products (Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor)…3 min
  6. 67Reasoning Modelsthe course comes full circleThe finale, and three flags planted across ten lessons converge here. Recall them: Topic 54 — chain-of-thought works because tokens are…4 min

Start with Topic 62: VLMs, or browse all 90 topics.