[refulgentis]

I have spent the last 2.5 years living like a monk to maintain an app across all paid LLM providers and llama.cpp.

I wish this was true.

It isn't.

"In algorithms, we have space vs time tradeoffs, therefore a small LLM can get there with more time" is the same sort of "not even wrong" we all smile about us HNers doing when we try applying SWE-thought to subjects that aren't CS.

What you're suggesting amounts to "monkeys on typewriters will write entire works of Shakespeare eventually" - neither in practice, nor in theory, is this a technical claim, or something observable, or even stood up as a one-off misleading demo once.

[cantor_S_drug]

If "not even wrong" is more wrong than wrong, then is 'not even right" more right than right.

To answer you directly, a smaller SOTA reasoning model with a table of facts can rederive relationships given more time than a bigger model which encoded those relationships implicitly.