Normie queries can be handled quite well by Haiku 4.6 or whatever.
What new bike should I get? How should I rephrase this email? What to do about my persistent headaches? Recipes based on these ingredients?
Small models inherently have less pre-trained knowledge, which will hurt their performance on queries like this. Moreover a lot of queries benefit from doing web searches, especially if they need to respond to changing conditions such as your bike example. Now you have to send data through a data center anyway for good performance, and probably need to use an API if you don’t want your computer blocked. So what’s the point, when GPT Luna exists if you really want to get a decent model at a rock-bottom price?
I don’t need or want “pre-trained knowledge”, I need a computer program capable of searching the web, sifting out the garbage returned in the search results, and giving me a summary of the useful information it found.