You may also be getting a worse result for higher cost.

For a medical use case, we tested multiple Anthropic and OpenAI models as well as MedGemma. Pleasantly surprised when the LLM as Judge scored gpt5-mini as the clear winner. I don't think I would have considered using it for the specific use cases - assuming higher reasoning was necessary.

Still waiting on human evaluation to confirm the LLM Judge was correct.

That's interesting. Similarly, we found out that for very simple tasks the older Haiku models are interesting as they're cheaper than the latest Haiku models and often perform equally well.

You obviously know what you’re looking for better than me, but personally I’d want to see a narrative that made sense before accepting that a smaller model somehow just performs better, even if the benchmarks say so. There may be such an explanation, it feels very dicey without one.