[forgingahead]

Where does "Smol" come from? It's supposed to mean "Small" right? If yes then what's the etymology and reason for popular usage?

[potsandpans]

It's just internet speak from the days of tumbler. It usually has cutsie connotations.

Tumbler speak has a bunch of whacky things, notably "chimkin nuggers."

[lewtun]

In the specific case of SmolLM, it originates from the meme in this dataset https://huggingface.co/datasets/bigcode/the-stack-smol