Paper Instruments releases open-source Ultramarine 1 Flash, claiming performance parity with Fable at 60x lower cost.
AI & Agents ·
Paper Instruments has released Ultramarine 1 Flash, an open-source model for knowledge work tasks, claiming performance matching Fable 5 at a 60x cost advantage. The model was developed by a five-person team for approximately $300,000 and applies reinforcement learning to base model GLM-5.3 Flash, improving across six knowledge-work benchmarks by an average of 4.1 points while reducing token generation by 6.5%. On an internal knowledge-work evaluation suite, Ultramarine 1 Flash costs $0.13 per task compared to $8.19 for Claude Fable 5 and $2.09 for GPT-5.6 Sol, and the API is now available with open-source weights releasing within two weeks.