Apodex open-sourced a Smol SFT series (0.8B, 2B, 4B) alongside its 35B-A3B mini. Their reported evaluation shows the 4B SFT outperforming open 30B-class models on both BrowseComp and BrowseComp-ZH.
This kind of result keeps pointing to the same pattern in deep research: model size is not always the main constraint.
What remains to be tested is whether the same gap persists on longer-horizon research tasks, where retrieval, planning, and evidence aggregation matter more.