I wish these would stop using JevBench. It focuses way too much on text classification tasks, and some of the models perform very poorly on tasks that need actual intelligence.
I appreciate what the JevBench folks are doing, but it's true the JevBench (like all benchmarks) isn't representative of every real-world workloads. I particularly don't love how JevBench handles confidence, and rewards being highly confident in certain cases. Benchmarking is hard, and JevBench is probably more representation of its target workloads than TPC-C is :)
As for actual intelligence, there's only so much you can expect from 2B without reasoning. One of the design challenges in training this model was to avoid forgetting too much, and the KL-to-frozen-base step partially exists for that purpose. Even then, Qwen3.5 2B base has fairly limited single-pass reasoning ability (which shows up for us in the performance on the JevBench hard set).