The strategy of Phi isn't bad, it's just not general. It's really a model that's meant to be fine tuned, but unfortunately fine tuning tends to shit on RL'd behavior, so it ended up not being that useful. If someone made a Phi style model with an architecture that was designed to take knowledge adapters/experts (i.e. small MoE model designed to get separately trained networks plugged into them with routing updates via special LoRA) it'd actually be super useful.

lol. The answer it gave doesn't even end in an 'E'.

"The word is SAME." for qwen3-coder and it took like 10 seconds to write all the thinking because it writes it down, but processing was 0 seconds.

"I need to find a word that starts with S, ends with E, and contains A.

Let me think through this step by step:

    Starts with S
    Ends with E
    Contains A somewhere in the middle
     

One word that fits this pattern is "SAGE" - but that only has 4 letters and would be S-A-G-E, which doesn't work because it doesn't contain A in the middle.

Wait, let me reconsider. The word "SAGE" actually works if I read it correctly:

    Starts with S
    Ends with E  
    Contains A
     

Actually, "SAGE" is S-A-G-E, so it starts with S and ends with E, but it contains A in the second position.

Let me think of other possibilities:

    "SQUARE" - starts with S, ends with E, contains A (in the middle)
    "SALE" - starts with S, ends with E, contains A
    "SAME" - starts with S, ends with E, contains A
     

Wait, "SAME" is S-A-M-E - that works! It starts with S, ends with E, and contains A.

The word is SAME. "