A $0.25 model beat a $3 model -- with better context

The numbers I ran the same benchmark on two Claude models. The $0.25 model scored 11.8. The $3 model scored 5.3. The cheap model won by 223%. And it cost one-twelfth as much per token. I didn't expect this. Nobody expects this. The AI industry runs on a simple assumption: bigger model, better results. Pay more, get more. But the data told a different story. Claude Haiku 3, Anthropic's smallest model, paired with a RAG pipeline, outperformed Claude Sonnet 4 running with zero context. Not by a sma