Coding - Mistral-Small-2503 or Qwen2.5-32b-Coder Reasoning - QwQ-32b Writing - Gemma-3-27b is good at this. etc
I'm a fan of Mistral Small 3 personally but I've not spent enough time with it, Gemma and the new Mistral Small 3.1 to have an opinion of which of those is the "best" model.
The best indicator of model quality I can find right now is still https://lmarena.ai/?leaderboard=
Gemma 3 27B holds an impressive 8th place right now, second highest non-proprietary model after DeekSeek R1 (at 6th).
QwQ-32B is 12th. Weirdly I couldn't find either of the Mistral Small 3 models on there.
Gemma3 27B gives me a rapid 1shot response, and actually works really well for the type of rubber duck brainstorming partner I often need.
Now, yes, QwQ will take a lot of tokens to get there (in one case it took it over 5 minutes running on Mac Studio M1 Ultra). Nevertheless, at least it can solve it.
Translating this to code, for example, it means that Gemma is that much more likely to pretend to solve a more complicated problem that you give it by "simplifying" it to something it already knows how to solve.