> a bit cheaper

Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite is $500/Gt, Jev is $42/Gt. AKA an order of magnitude cheaper.

> BERT with more data

It is specifically not just that, in the same way that models which have been chat/task-optimized via RLHF (which made these models much more useful for a huge variety of tasks) are not just "the base transformer model with more data".