Not really. I am not saying CNNs were bad in what they were doing. But comparing to a frontier model, I believe frontier models have an advantage over them. Not any other model, only frontier models. I create end to end AI/ML pipelines for clients usecases, so telling with experience.
Yeah but there has been no evidence to suggest that a frontier language model is going to be better at such a domain specific niche task than a vision model trained specifically for that task. This is not the same discussion as a foundation model vs CNNs (which in my opinion would have made for a better blog post than what OP tested)