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.
You just need a robust benchmark. As long as you understand your benchmark, you can trust the results.
We have a hard OCR problem.
It's very easy to make high-confidence benchmarks for OCR problems (just type out the ground truth by hand), so it's easy to trust the benchmark. Think accuracy and token F1. I'm talking about highly complex OCR that requires a heavyweight model.
Scout (Meta), a very small/weak model, is outperforming Gemini Flash. This is highly unexpected and a huge cost savings.
Volume and statistical significance? I'm not sure what kind of narrative I would trust beyond the actual data.
It's the hard part of using LLMs and a mistake I think many people make. The only way to really understand or know is to have repeatable and consistent frameworks to validate your hypothesis (or in my case, have my hypothesis be proved wrong).
