small models

Amazon Web Services has released Strands Decider 2B, an open-source model that chooses among pre-decided options and returns a confidence score instead of generating text. It is inspired by TypeSafe's Jev and is small enough to run locally. Amazon says it briefly topped the Jevbench ranking for models of its size.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says the company is prioritizing token efficiency and compact, single-purpose models over general-purpose frontier systems. New models MAI-Cyber-1-Flash and MAI-Image-2.5-Flash claim strong cost-performance gains, but rely on an orchestration layer that still routes hard tasks to OpenAI's reasoning models.