Ultramarine 1 Flash beats Claude Fable 5 at 60x lower cost
Ultramarine 1 Flash
Paper Instruments released Ultramarine 1 Flash, an open model for professional work in finance, law, consulting, and operations. It scores above Claude Fable 5 (max) and GPT-5.6 Sol (max) on the company's PI Knowledge Work benchmark while costing just $0.13 per task versus $8.19 and $2.09. It also generates 6.5% fewer tokens than its base, GLM-5.3 Flash, and is priced at $0.15 per million input tokens.
Ultramarine 1 Flash is Fable-class on knowledge work spanning finance, law, consulting, and operations. It is also 60x cheaper than Fable.
- kadoban
> We present Ultramarine 1 Flash, an agentic model for professional knowledge work. Ultramarine applies large-scale reinforcement learning to a strong open base model, GLM-5.3 Flash, and improves on it across all six knowledge-work benchmarks we evaluate [...]
In case anyone was curious what it's based on. (No judgement either way from me, IMO depends how well they did the post-training, which I can't tell).
- CobrastanJorji
As an aside, I do not like unnecessarily misleading graphs. Own your strengths and weaknesses.
In the "Results" section, they choose to compare Ultramarine only to models that it's better than on every metric. They ignore models like Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, Claude Opus 5.5, etc.
Then, in the "Score against cost per task" graph, which is focused on price, suddenly all of those models that perform better than Ultramarine come roaring back because they are also more expensive.
Just list yourselves as the second best sometimes. Your thing is impressive. Don't let the idiot marketing guy hide that behind stupid tricks.
- bythreads
I’m confused this seems exactly like a skinned glm 5.3 - flash with a few context injection tricks and guardrails - whats going on with these “startups”?
- vehemenz
Price/performance is as advertised in my limited testing. I happened to be testing the same task with Haiku, GPT-mini, and Deepseek v4 0731 yesterday, so I had a reasonable baseline to compare the model to.
- hypfer
What kind of harness does one use for these?
They say it can create office documents (if I understand correctly), but how does it do that?
What's the thing one needs to plug this into to say "give me a slide deck with last quarter's sales figures"?
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https://www.paperinstruments.com/feather
According to their Twitter video, it might be this thing?
- test_user369
I'm curious to try it out, how many specialized models will it take to run a company.
Going to try it out for some bookkeeping, e.g. point it to a folder and tell it to book the invoices and point it to a csv file holding a year of private transactions and see them being processed, categorized and then ask about certain trends.
- binbag
As someone who is not a software developer (there are some of us here, lurking around because we learn things) but who runs a business and spends his days doing said 'knowledge work', how and why would something like this convince me to move the company away from using Claude (as a desktop app)? I'm sure these models are cheaper to use than our Team subscription with Claude, but it feels like it would be a massive headache for me to work out how to select and implement some harness for this and set it up for people, and the space is moving so quickly I'd feel I need to keep considering when to move to some new model, introducing risk. The safest bet for us and most companies I expect is to stick with what you know works and pay a premium for that. Thoughts very welcome please.
- chicagobuss
why does the pareto cost per task chart not have 6.1 sol?