It depends. Amazon’s Nova Light gave me the best speed vs performance when I needed really quick real time inference for categorizing a users input (think call centers).

One of Anthropics models did the best with image understanding with Amazon’s Nova Pro being slightly behind.

For my tests, I used a customer’s specific set of test data.

For RAG I forgot. But is much more subjective. I just gave the customer an ability to configure the model and modify the prompt so they could choose.

Your experience matches mine then... I haven't noticed any clear, consistent differences. I'm always looking for second opinions on this (bc I've gotten fairly cynical). Appreciate it