alt Hacker NewsThe entire universe of automation projects that can be run effectively for free relative to SoTA models?
I don't think many realize that most LLM embedded automation, pipelines, products will soon be able to run extremely cheaply on models < 100B parameters.
Frontier models will be used for coding/creation use cases, yes. But for all the pseudo-deterministic, pipeline, analysis style things there will be no practical benefit to running frontier models, only additional cost.
Gemma 4 26B outperforms most 100-200B models that I've tested for reasoning and structured output.
Gemma 4 12B can consistently select where to click on browser images given a minimal prompt, and do so very quickly.
Replies
Practically if you're running a small personal automation project you're not going to want to waste a lot of time configuring and tuning a local model. You want to build the automation and move on.
If you're building a automation as a company you definitely won't want to take on the long term maintenance overhead of running your own models for some automation project.
The 26B model is really surprising, and it is impressively concise — it spends a lot less time dithering than Qwen3.6.