What are you trying to do?

Write code? No. Use frontier models. They are subsidized and amazing and they get noticably better ever few months.

Literally anything else? Smaller models are fine. Classifiers, sentiment analysis, editing blog posts, tool calling, whatever. They go can through documents and extract information, summarize, etc. When making a voice chat system awhile back I used a cheap open weight model and just asked it "is the user done speaking yet" by passing transcripts of what had been spoken so far, and this was 2 years ago and a crappy cheap low weight model. Be creative.

I wouldn't trust them to do math, but you can tool call out to a calculator for that.

They are perfectly fine at holding conversations. Their weights aren't large enough to have every book ever written contained in them, or the details of every movie ever made, but unless you need that depth and breadth of knowledge, you'll be fine.

▲

space_fountain 4 days ago | parent [-]

I just mean is the claim that the open source models where the closed models were 12 to 6 months ago true? They do seem to be for some specific tasks which is cool, but they seem even more uneven in skills than the frontier model. They're definitely useful tools, but I'm not sure if they're a match for frontier models from a year ago?

	▲	com2kid 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Frontier models from a year ago had issues with consistent tool calling, instruction following was pretty good but could still go off the rails from time to time. Open weight models have those same issues. They are otherwise fine. You can hook them up to a vector DB and build a RAG system. They can answer simple questions and converse back and forth. They have thinking modes that solve more complex problems. They aren't going to discover new math theorems but they'll control a smart home and manage your calendar.