There is so much opportunity for purpose built models like this. Ideally a harness should spin up a subagent to offload to targeted models for specific tasks like this. I know this is not a novel idea. Claude code does some of this by handing off the "explore" agent work to haiku. I just love seeing that specialized LLMs are being developed.

On what do you guys test the model. Its very dubious that there is no common retrieval benchmark such as browsecomp plus or similar tested. And what metric do you report?

There is a more serious question in here that's not being answered. How effective is the retrieval in finding buried needles in larger and larger haystacks. And there's a correlary question, how effective could you be in finding paired needles in that haystack where you need to hold a needle to unlock finding another needle.

I have done my own testing and found that smaller models can beat their larger siblings on fact retrieval from documents. I haven’t investigated it in depth with a large enough dataset but my guess is that larger models overthink it while smaller ones just do it. I would like if they compared this with 5.6 Luna instead.

Bit unrelated, I realized that z.ai gives you access to deepseek 4 flash. It's incredible how well it performs when given a detailed spec. I'm not sure I've seen a model one-shot like that, and I was already impressed by gemma 4's speed and efficiency.

One thing that plagues [insert current FAANG] is the large amount of corpus knowledge that is outdated/misleading or just plain wrong. I'm curious how this addresses that if it's deriving the reward function from the corpus itself.