Lewis Tunstall says specialised science models beat frontier LLMs on cost

Lewis Tunstall, a Hugging Face researcher, posted on X that frontier LLMs must become orders of magnitude cheaper to handle science at scale, and that specialised models work better as tools called by generalist models.

He cites ChefNMR2, which he says has up to 2,170 times lower median runtime and 360 times lower median cost per molecule than the frontier LLMs it was tested against. The post gives no details of the test set or the models compared.