I get what you're saying, but I think this is still missing something pretty critical.

The smaller models can recognize the bug when they're looking right at it, that seems to be verified. And with AISLE's approach you can iteratively feed the models one segment at a time cheaply. But if a bug spans multiple segments, the small model doesn't have the breadth of context to understand those segments in composite.

The advantage of the larger model is that it can retain more context and potentially find bugs that require more code context than one segment at a time.

That said, the bugs showcased in the mythos paper all seemed to be shallow bugs that start and end in a single input segment, which is why AISLE was able to find them. But having more context in the window theoretically puts less shallow bugs within range for the model.

I think the point they are making, that the model doesn't matter as much as the harness, stands for shallow bugs but not for vulnerability discovery in general.