Can a 2.5B Model Plus Modern Harness Match Pre-March-2025 Frontier Models?
COMPLOGICGADH · reddit · 2026-09-17
A Reddit user asks whether sub-10B SOTA models like MiniCPM5-2B (2.5B params, 131K context) combined with a modern harness — tool calling, web search, RAG/memory, code execution, browser/filesystem access, context management, verification loops — can practically match pre-March-2025 frontier models like GPT-4o and Grok 3 for everyday use. They note benchmark comparisons aren't apples-to-apples and want real-world answers on where small-model systems still fall short: hard reasoning, planning, long-horizon agents, instruction following.
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