Pinned
Small models are making a comeback. Qualifying a dataset and finetuning a small checkpoint is almost always going to yield better results (and cost) than just using a generalized frontier cloud model.
For example, I was able to finetune an adapter for a small Qwen3.5-4B
We were able to fine tune an open weight model (Qwen3.5-9B) on proprietary internal data at @coinbase, and it out performed frontier models, at much lower cost and speed, for a specialized task (fraud prevention in this case).
I think we'll see more of this pattern inside