I don't understand LLMs enough to know if this is a silly question or not. Is it possible to build domain specific smaller models and merge/combine them at query/run time to give better response or performance instead of one large all knowing model that learns everything ?
You can use a specific LLM, or a general larger LLM to do this routing.
Also, some work suggest using smaller llms to generate multiple responses and use a stronger and larger model to rank the responses (which is much more efficient than generating them)