Small models are going through a real growth spurt right now. On my personal-agent tests (PA Core, reasoning on, RTX 3080), three models at 2B and under now land within 21 points of each other, and rubbing shoulders with older 4B/9B weights. Newest on the bench: Spark X2.6 1.7B from @SparkLLM - PA total: 172.3/300 - Tool calls: 30/30 in every run - Context recall: 9.3 at 8K, 8.7 at 16K, best of the three! - Schedule and draft (PA2): 98 and 100 in two runs, one 54 pulled the mean to 84 - Daily organization (PA1): 35.7, the weak spot Under 2B, three different strengths. @liquidai LFM3 plans, @SparkLLM Spark reads, @OpenBMB MiniCPM5 is the balanced one. Leave thinking on. With it off, Spark is a much weaker model on these tasks.