> But what the article doesn't say is, compared to other model families, Granite 4.1 8B sucks.

Right. This just says that Granite 4.1 8B is better than a previous version, Granite 4.0-H-Small, which has 32B, 9B active.

So, they made a less bad model than before. But that doesn't tell you anything about how it compares with other models.