The reason small-model agent stacks aren't the default has nothing to do with whether they work

In three linesSmall specialized models (Gemma 4 31B at 86.4% on tau2-bench, Qwen 27B outperforming 397B models) now dominate agentic benchmarks. Yet the industry keeps deploying expensive frontier models: frontier labs profit from per-token billing, creating misalignment between technical performance and market adoption.

Summary generated by Claude — human-verified