What you describe reminds me of some studies of jumping spiders. Some aspects of their intelligence (like counting) matches that of a 1 year old human, but because their brains are so tiny it just takes them much longer to do the same counting. IOW it's not the size of the model, but how it's organized and the strategies for using it.

This article has lots of fluff but it describes a lot of what I'm talking about:

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/mind/2021/are-s...