Samaya Sterling beats Claude Fable 5.1 at 11x lower cost
MarkTechPost: Samaya AI Releases Sterling: A 3B-Active Finance Research Agent Model that Beats Claude Fable 5.1 on FrontierFinance at 11x Lower Cost
Samaya AI has released Samaya Sterling, a post-trained model for agentic financial research. Sterling is built on NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a 30B mixture-of-experts model with 3B active parameters. On Samaya’s FrontierFinance benchmark, it scores 58.9%. Claude Fable 5.1 scores 55.9%. Each Sterling question costs $0.61, against $6.89 for Fable 5.1. For developers, the takeaway is a concrete recipe: co-train a small model with its harness, and it can win in a narrow domain.
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Samaya AI released Sterling, a financial research model built on a base model with 30 billion total parameters but only 3 billion active parameters at any time. Sterling scored 58.9 percent on the FrontierFinance benchmark, outperforming Claude Fable 5.1's 55.9 percent while costing 11 times less per question: $0.61 versus $6.89. The model was trained using a combination of synthetic data and expert-written questions, then refined through multiple stages including supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, with specialized helper models managing its research process. The key insight is that a smaller model tuned for a specific domain with the right supporting systems can outperform larger general-purpose models on that domain while dramatically reducing costs.
Explainer: Claude Fable 5.1 Explained: Price, Changes and the Ban Story
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