They're not talking about the same thing.

Last week, researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) released a new family of open-source multimodal models competitive with state-of-the-art models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o—but an order of magnitude smaller.

That's in reference to the size of the model itself.

They then compiled a more focused, higher quality dataset of around 700,000 images and 1.3 million captions to train new models with visual capabilities. That may sound like a lot, but it’s on the order of 1,000 times less data than what’s used in proprietary multimodal models.

That's in reference to the size of the training data that was used to train the model.

Minimizing both of those things is useful, but for different reasons. Smaller training sets make the model cheaper to train, and a smaller model makes the model cheaper to run.