I have done my own testing and found that smaller models can beat their larger siblings on fact retrieval from documents. I haven’t investigated it in depth with a large enough dataset but my guess is that larger models overthink it while smaller ones just do it. I would like if they compared this with 5.6 Luna instead.
Any data or public links you can share? That surprises me
Anecdotally, it feels like Opus, Fable, and Sol "get distracted" when you use them for writing code. Great at reasoning and coordination but they will go off on a tangent and refactor half the code base. I only use them for reasoning (of course) and coordinating subagents.