The Small Model Revolution
Highlights
- ▸Small fine-tuned models match frontier quality on narrow tasks at ~1/10 the inference cost — high-volume production workloads are the first to flip
- ▸The mental model is task-appropriate: classification/extraction/routing → small model; novel reasoning/long-horizon/ambiguous → frontier — pick per workload, not per company
- ▸Two years of 'just use GPT-4' are ending — model choice is becoming a real engineering decision again, and that's the small-model revolution
Original excerpt
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