When to use Small LM for AI Agents: New Insights

"Small and mid-sized open-weight models are already sufficient for much of the short-horizon, structured tool use work that dominates real agent pipelines, and in aggregate, the strongest open-weight model matches GPT-5 on our benchmark while being substantially cheaper and faster to run." all rights w/ users: AgentFloor: How Far Up the tool use Ladder Can Small Open-Weight Models Go? A Preprint Ranit Karmakar Harvard University, Boston, MA 02115 ranit.karmakar@outlook.com Jayita Chatterjee Boston, MA 02115 jayita_chatterjee@outlook.com arXiv:2605.00334 #aiexplained #localai #smallbusiness #aiagents #nextgenai