A year ago I had an aha moment, when I realized that for my purposes, Gemini Flash was not only 9x cheaper, but 3x faster than Gemini Pro, while producing identical output. Who's the best model now!

For a lot of tasks, even small models have saturated them a while ago, and then going cheaper and faster is just pure gains.

For coding I also prefer to do it interactive/realtime, micro-prompting, surgical edits, which the small models can handle just fine.

And then at the top, the real question is consistency. Not "can they do it" but "reliably enough that you don't need to constantly double check everything." (In my experience, not quite there yet, although it's getting way better.)