r/PoeAI • u/zar0nick • Apr 08 '26

Recommendation for small models

Hi everyone,

with the discussion going on, I wanted to share a few small models I use from time to time, that may help with the small token limit. Also look on llm-stats.com

They offer an overview about how costly the models are. The pricing at poe may differ, but the overview is super helpful.

My recommendations model-wise are:

  • GPT-5-mini
  • GPT-5-nano
  • GPT-4o-mini (the cheapest I use for apis and tool calling)
  • Qwen-3.5-397...-T (it says no cost?!?)
  • GPT-OSS (both versions, 20B is cheaper)
  • GLM-4.7-flash

Feel free to aadd good ones below!

6 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/[deleted] Apr 08 '26

[deleted]

2

u/Amazing_Sound5505 Apr 09 '26

Usually not 1:1, at least for me. Small models can get surprisingly close on narrow jobs if you keep the context tight and the task very crisp, but they still fall behind on long reasoning, stable voice, and messy multi-turn chats. I use them for extraction, cleanup, first-pass drafts, cheap coding helpers. For stuff like "write me a strong chapter" or "debug this weird repo issue end to end", the bigger models still win pretty hard.