I tried this today for labelling - and for that task it was very bad MNLI was better - so you are going to need to match the use case for this pretty exactly. (at 29MB params one would expect that!) I'm obviously not saying labelling is a good use case :-) just adding a data point.

Jev has put the cat amongst the pigeons so suddenly everyone is looking at classifiers and encoder only models again.

My ideal model would be a general purpose LLM API that can answer classification questions and as it does so distils to an encoder only model so that the more classifications I do the cheaper it gets (i.e. the more it offloads to the classifier). If anyone ever wants to do this as a service do let me know, because it's just another piece of code to manage in each new project that needs classification.

Also a model that could do this internally would be nice :-)