castform founder here. while it's "rare for a specialized model to beat a strong general model" today, i think the tech/knowhow on how to do so is getting there. we see some early signs of this in industry e.g.

https://shopify.engineering/sidekicks-continual-learning-loo... https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/learning-to-replicate-exper... https://castform.com/blog/elsa/

at the end of the day, models are only as good as the data they're trained on. and if one has access to proprietary data, it should yield specialized models that do better than larger general models