Introducing Awesome Open Workhorse Models, a hand-curated collection of small language models (SLMs) that have actually seen enterprise adoption. You've probably heard the hype on the usefulness of SLMs, and how 'they are the future.' But what does that actually mean? What are the models enterprises are actually using to solve their problems cheaper, faster, or more accurately than frontier LLMs? I've assembled a list of small models that I know for a fact are used in production, and have included evidence that they are used to solve real-world problems. If you are using an SLM in prod, please reach out, or even better submit a PR! My goal is to make this the best collection of actually useful small models, because HF downloads simply isn't an effective metric on whether a model is actually good.