I think we’re in agreement.

I make heavy use of smaller local models on a daily basis (Qwen3-VL for auto-captioning images, Gemma3:27b for some translation work, etc.). Gemma3:27b is a good example of a very capable general purpose multimodal model and has handled almost everything I've thrown at it from sentiment analysis to documentation writing.

I suppose I was drawing a distinction between specialized and general intelligence versus small and large. I don’t think those are necessarily mutually exclusive.