What models would you recommend for basic classification if you don't need a 24B parameter one?

You might find this comparison chart helpful: https://www.airtrain.ai/blog/how-15-top-llms-perform-on-clas...

Note: from October; also I work at Airtrain

There's no alternative to testing with your own data. The majority of our data is in French, and our benchmarks differ greatly from public benchmarks generally based on English documents.

I’m using Llama-3 8B to classify html files. It’s surprisingly good, and I run it on an RTX 4060 Ti at 8-bit quantization. No complains so far.

Would this work for non-text data? Like finding outliers in a time series or classifying trends, that kind of thing

Don't use LLM to do something that some python + panda lines could do better. Buy a data scientist a coffee and have a chat.