Our Smaller Model Beat Opus on Finance Tasks - Alexander Shevchenko, Ramp

Alexander Shevchenko of Ramp Labs explains why an application company keeps running applied research rather than waiting for the next frontier model, and walks through three projects in production: a post-trained Qwen 3.5 specialist for financial question answering at Haiku-level latency, KV cache cartridges that prepare agents with far more context ahead of time, and a 10,000-agent swarm that pen-tested Ramp and found seven high-severity vulnerabilities using cheaper open-weight models.