You Don’t Always Need The Frontier

Short summary

Developers often default to frontier AI models for all tasks, but today's smaller models like Sonnet 4.6, Gemini Flash 3.5, and GPT-5.4 Mini match frontier performance from six months ago at lower cost and speed. Industry workshops are shifting focus from RAG and prompt engineering to evals and measuring AI outputs. Developers should reconsider defaulting to the latest models and evaluate what each task actually needs.

• •Smaller models today match frontier model performance from six months ago
• •Significant cost savings and speed improvements over frontier models
• •Industry shifting from RAG/prompt engineering toward evals and model measurement

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