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Sakana Fugu
- nickandbro 3mo agoVery interesting. I wonder if its kinda functions similarly to how OpenRouter's fusion API does. Hopefully isn't too long to respond.
- stygiansonic 3mo agoFrom a brief reading of what Fusion does: https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/plugins/fusion https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/plugins/fusion Looks like Fusion calls a bunch of models and then uses an LLM to synthesize the results, and pass to another model for final output. Fugu looks like it's doing something different? Using an LLM earlier on in the flow as an orchestrator to decide which other LLMs to call. More coordinator than simply synthesizing results, and more "agentic". It's interesting because it's all exposed behind a single OpenAI compatible endpoint (Responses API?) and so then presumably someone could use this for one of their single agents. Now you have agent-of-agents, nested in some sense. The token usage increases accordingly!
- ljlolel 3mo agoYea similar, possibly even more steps / slower. I put together an all open source fusion at 1/3 of price of Fable: https://trustedrouter.com/blog/open-fusion-beats-fable-5 https://trustedrouter.com/blog/open-fusion-beats-fable-5 We open sourced it all and will be releasing a similar orchestrator next week on TrustedRouter
- ed_mercer 3mo agoSo basically... openrouter?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- alasano 3mo agoOpenRouter Fusion is basically ask N models + synthesizer step. This is ask a special orchestrator they built, which is in front of a bunch of models, which model would suit the request best. Regular Fugu seems to be just "pick the best model and route the request there" Fugu Ultra can generate like a little mini workflow/plan instead to achieve a result 1. Ask GPT to derive the math. 2. Ask Opus to check for implementation/security issues. 3. Ask Gemini to synthesize or resolve disagreement. 4. Return final answer. I could be wrong but seems to be that at a glance, so I think it's more dynamic than OpenRouter Fusion.
- runeblaze 3mo agolinks to two papers with at least enough apparent quality and novelty to get into ICLR 2026 > So basically... openrouter :skull: i now really wonder how many people of the public understood my thesis defense lol
- Npovview 3mo agoThen there is this as well. https://www.databricks.com/blog/introducing-omnigent-meta-harness-combine-control-and-share-your-agents https://www.databricks.com/blog/introducing-omnigent-meta-ha...
- ljlolel 3mo agoI’ve also developed and open-sourced Mythos level model using fusion/synthesis on TrustedRouter https://trustedrouter.com/blog/fusion-evals-open-source https://trustedrouter.com/blog/fusion-evals-open-source
- eevmanu 3mo agoReminds me of <https://github.com/irthomasthomas/llm-consortium https://github.com/irthomasthomas/llm-consortium>
- eevmanu 3mo agoFugu Ultra <https://console.sakana.ai/models#fugu-ultra https://console.sakana.ai/models#fugu-ultra> sounds similar to GPT-5.5 Pro or Gemini 3.1 Deep Think . Is there any official source that could confirms if Fable (or Mythos) is parallelized test-time compute (like GPT 5.5 Pro) or sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) transformer combined with a multi-agent, inference-time compute scaling architecture (Gemini 3.1 Deep Think)?
- embedding-shape 3mo ago> Frontier-level performance without single-vendor dependency. [...] Plug collective intelligence directly into your workflows today with a single API. Does multiple vendors run this "single API" or how is this not replacing a single-vendor dependency for another single-vendor dependency?
- bprasanna 3mo agoIsn't this what perplexity is?
- JumpCrisscross 3mo agoIs Perplexity still a daily driver for a lot of folks?
- Alifatisk 3mo agoStopped using it after they added phone number verification.
- Alifatisk 3mo agoPerplexity is just a RAG search engine using one model at a time, from my understanding
- adamnemecek 3mo agoSeems kinda underwhelming considering they raised like $400M.
- ffsm8 3mo ago400m is the new 400k! Just look at the other company evaluations and how much they raised vs what they delivered
- itemize123 3mo agoit's just one of their products right
- nixosbestos 3mo agoAI noob question, is this like Amp? I just use Amp, I ask it to do neat stuff and it does it. I desperately need to invest in my AI skills but every day I open two new tabs and add it to "AI stuff" folder, and then go back to drowning in work to do.
- GolfPopper 3mo agoThis is a joke, right?
- NitpickLawyer 3mo agoNot necessarily. There were some tests last year-ish from hf that showed that simply alternating (randomly) between claude and gpt (whatever their versions were at the time) on a task produced better results than either of them individually. So during a task, the first call was sent to one, then the other and so on. There's also the concept of "smart routing" requests based on some heuristics / embeddings. You'd get "simple" tasks handled by smaller (cheaper) models and use a bigger model to curate / sort / merge the results. There's a lot of things to try here. I wouldn't personally pay for this service, but I don't think it's "a joke"...
- andai 3mo agoSee also: Agents built from alloys (July 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44630724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44630724 They randomly alternated between frontier LLMs and got a massive boost to performance on cybersecurity tasks.
- Alifatisk 3mo ago> There were some tests last year-ish from hf that showed that simply alternating (randomly) between claude and gpt (whatever their versions were at the time) on a task produced better results than either of them individually. So during a task, the first call was sent to one, then the other and so on. Where can I read more about these tests?
- puttycat 3mo agoCan someone explain this in layman terms? I don't understand any of it
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- david_shi 3mo agoIt's similar to this: https://openrouter.ai/blog/announcements/fusion-beats-frontier/ https://openrouter.ai/blog/announcements/fusion-beats-fronti... Basically, if you combine a bunch of near-frontier models (like GPT 5.5, etc) you can get performance that sometimes surpasses top line models like Claude's Fable. Sakana seems to have a separate approach using a domain specific model to perform the model routing step.
- chenzhekl 3mo agoBut it's priced the same as frontier models. Why do I not directly pay for frontier models?
- itemize123 3mo agou get a pool of them + sakana?
- david_shi 3mo agoThis is a charitable read, but I think that being able to pick from a panoply of models will actually yield much better results in the long run. The same model that has been post-trained to operate for hours as a Linux admin will be incapable of writing a heartfelt email, but with something like Fugu, you'd get both the Linux admin for driving the browser harness and the smaller writing specialist model for drafting the email itself.
- Npovview 3mo agoSo plain old ensemble technique in classical ML.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- david_shi 3mo agoTheir research around building a domain specific model is pretty cool, it's kind of like Karpathy's autoresearch but pointed at deciding the optimal model to use at each step of the inference. If cost becomes an even bigger problem being able to choose "best performance possible" or "strong but cost effective" will be useful. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04695 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04695
- prodigycorp 3mo agongl, I thought sakana.ai was doing cooler stuff than this. that said, the release of a product like this makes sense because it follows your natural intuition when using these models. The best way to use LLMs is to have at least two in your pocket, because the models do a good job at covering each others assets and filling in obvious model-specific blindspots. it's interesting that they're offering in the form of fixed cost subscription plans too. My impression was that the first party providers can do this because they api inference margins to the tune of 80ish percent. Anyone else orchestrating on top of these models have to pass through these costs or eat it themselves.
- holistio 3mo agoYou pay $200/month to Anthropic, $200/month to OpenAI, $200/month to Cursor, $200/month to $200/month to Google, and seeing that it didn't come to a nice round $1024/month, you pay $200/month to Sakana to coordinate it all, because why not. While you're at it, feel free to send me $200 as well, I'll generate a crypto address ending with "AI".
- someone_1234 3mo agoOr use openrouter and switch to model you want to use..(i think so)
- ljlolel 3mo agoOr TrustedRouter if you want privacy and open source
- yorwba 3mo agoYou ought to realize that shilling your product in the comments doesn't exactly come across as trustworthy.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo agoDisclosing affiliation hasn’t been a legal thing for a while. It’s reputational. Knowing that firm spams is a black mark.
- smusamashah 3mo agoOh! I thought TrustedRouter was a joke/sarcasm. Very wrong placement of the comment.
- ljlolel 3mo agoIt’s all open source and I say that it’s mine in all the sibling comments above
- holistio 3mo ago
- rvz 3mo agoJust letting you guys know that the model is not a moat.
- cortesi 3mo agoAs a developer outside the US I think it's vital to have alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic, but sadly this is not it. For $200/month you get < 3 hours of use per week, the API is extremely slow, and the output quality in my tests is nowhere near Fable. It's nowhere remotely near usable as a day-to-day workhorse. Very disappointing. https://x.com/cortesi/status/2068898694238486658 https://x.com/cortesi/status/2068898694238486658
- NetOpWibby 3mo agoI'm glad eager people like you test for lazy people like me
- itemize123 3mo agou seem to be the only one who used it here - how did it compare to opus and gpt5.5? in theory it should be at least on par if not better at times right.
- cortesi 3mo agoI only had time to use it for a couple of deep reviews of large Rust projects, and a few agentic coding tasks (implement plan X, refactor Y in fashion Z) before my quota ran out. My impression is that the reviews were quite strong - maybe Opus 4.8+ or around GPT 5.5 (for my particular use case) - but very slow. For implementation I found it weaker, it made a few mistakes that I haven't seen frontier models make in a long time.
- epsteingpt 3mo agoBeta user: they piloted OpenRouter fusion before it was seen as the viable step. Everyone's understood for months now that having different models check each other is the best path forward. This gets you that in a nice neat package, without the underlying tinkering mechanics. If (big iff) the usage mechanics work out, then this is actually a really good anti-big-model strategy. They'll be incentivized for your success, not token-maximizing for their investors. The team is super smart too. What's not to like? Wishing them the best on launch.
- prodigycorp 3mo agoif you've used codex or claude, how do the usage limits on fugu feel compared to the pro plans on either? honestly wouldn't mind subscribing to this if it's as generous as what codex is giving me monthly, which seems unrealistic.
- epsteingpt 3mo agoHard to say - since I used it in Beta with free credits, where the usage felt more 'Opus' than 'ChatGPT' but more efficient token wise. Switching models every time is annoying. But their paid plans I'm not sure yet - planning to subscribe and can let you know. Almost no chance it will be as generous as OpenAI though. They just don't have the money :-)
- chvid 3mo agoThis would have been much more interesting and impactful if it had relied on open source models rather than commercial models that are only availble via an API. The reasoning chains could have been used, and the resulting combined model could easily and effectively have been distilled.
- Lethalman 3mo agohttps://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- jihadjihad 3mo agoAnd it's gonna be like that in this space for the next decade-plus.
- chenzhekl 3mo agoI probably will never pay to Sakana, as they are involved in military contracts. https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/politics/defense-security/20260314-316288/ https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/politics/defense-security/20...
- totetsu 3mo agoYeah, I was trying to parse their "defense policy" https://sakana.ai/company-info/defense-policy.html?lang=en https://sakana.ai/company-info/defense-policy.html?lang=en But it seems like lot of words to say we have no policy and we'll just go along with the powers that be. Like they rely on deferring to the Pacifist constitution, which the current administration if moving mountains to try and change. And when it it you can bet they will not want to give up their defense contracts.
- nickandbro 3mo agoI imagine if it was Deepseek partnering with the CCP it would be different?
- chenzhekl 3mo agoI was just stating facts about Sakana, and that was enough to trigger you? For the same reason, I don’t use GPT either. At least for now, DeepSeek has no ties to the defense sector. And don’t talk as if the CCP were the devil. The U.S. president is the world’s biggest arms dealer, after all.
- lmm 3mo ago> At least for now, DeepSeek has no ties to the defense sector. Like every company based in China they are under the control of the Chinese state, which is an armed entity known to use violence.
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- njoyablpnting 3mo agoLooking at the technical report I'm a bit confused. The improvement from using their orchestrator models seems minimal (in some cases lower than just the model which I'm assuming is in the orchestrator's pool?). Maybe it's sort of acting as an additional reasoning step upfront? Sort of like how if you asked Claude to create a plan for how best to prompt itself, you would probably end up with a better result than just the base prompt. Also, from the technical report, looks like they're training on the output of Claude Code, etc. I'm guessing this doesn't violate TOS because they're technically not a directly competing model. This brings me to what I see as the main risk with this service, which is that it seems like an easy thing for a frontier lab to make obsolete, either by models beginning to converge in terms of strengths or by improving their own harnesses to include more of this meta-reasoning.
- 71bw 3mo agoAnd yet, as per usual... Not yet available in the EU/EEA while we work toward compliance with GDPR and EU-specific regulations.
- lmz 3mo agoThe price to pay for claiming your laws are applicable worldwide.
- claw-el 3mo agoWill Le Chat try to eat Sakana? There is Le Chaton Fat and then there is Sakana Fugu too..
- olmo23 3mo ago> Le Chaton Fat For others looking around: LCF is a meme model, it's not real. It's a joke.
- quanto 3mo agoThere are so many derisive comments here. David Ha, CEO and co-founder, was one of the youngest managing director at Goldman Sachs before doing ML at Google. His ML publications were considered top-notch almost a decade ago. I had high hopes for him when he raised money and founded Sakana. I do agree with some comments here that perhaps this particular product is not well thought out. I also agree with the criticism that David calls Sakana a frontier AI lab while making money just selling AI B2B applications to Japanese businesses. I also agree with the assessment that Sakana has abrasive and antagonistic, sometimes openly hostile, recruiting tactics. I also agree that his then-impressive publications may have lost their luster in the age of LLMs. However, the man is clearly driven; and he and his team may have more to offer in future. I admire the man for not taking the conventional AI-research career path.
- hsaliak 3mo agoso he's the quintessential brilliant jerk, ok
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- epsteingpt 3mo agoKind of shocking - a model comes out that beats mythos and offers a reasonable price and it ... gets downvoted? Probably taking hate from both sides - OpenAI / Claude fans who are undercutting its moat. Chinese open-model fans that want it to be cheaper. But it's a genuine accomplishment to hit those benchmarks and offer a reasonable plan? Bizarre reaction TBH.
- actionfromafar 3mo agoWhich model is that? What is it named?
- tagawa 3mo agoNot OP but I believe it’s Fugu (7B). According to [0]: “Fugu itself is a trained coordinator LLM.” [0] https://dev.classmethod.jp/en/articles/sakana-fugu-ga-first-touch/ https://dev.classmethod.jp/en/articles/sakana-fugu-ga-first-...
- monkeydust 3mo agoImho there are two dimensions here: Firstly different LLMs and secondly the strategy in which you break down the problem in an agentic fashion (e.g. break up to separate agents with own persona and then judge evaluates across all agents). You can of course mix-up the dimensions as well and that's what I have been tinkering* with for a good few months with some success. This was all done using home-brew setup running on openrouter. Personally I prefer understanding the dimensions and the interplay and controlling it though can see why openrouter and others are now offering this a solved solution. Just be careful when you start outsourcing too much of your intelligence needs to a blackbox. * https://github.com/monkeydust/rightmind https://github.com/monkeydust/rightmind
- mannanj 3mo agoThis is interesting. Would you share a few ways in which you're using this in your workflow? What about if you were to start a new project and test and built it out from scratch - how do you work this approach in without bogging everything down(including the simple things) down with overanalysis?
- monkeydust 3mo agoI only use this for high value problems/challenges. A lot related to life decisions including work, where to live, finances etc. It gives me a small army that can break down and slice, dice the problem in different ways then someone to reconcile it all and present it back to me. The variance in their opinions is the most interesting part of this project so f ar.
- mannanj 3mo agoThanks. I like the idea of doing this, myself, and glad you see a value from this. Do you not worry about giving away your most intimate data to for-profit companies who have not signed to protect your data in a dignified fashion?
- Lwrless 3mo agoGot myself the $20 subscription and tried it out. The 5-hour limit runs out surprisingly fast. Quality is okay but it feels slow, and even with my $20 Claude subscription on Fable, the credit usage ends up being lower. Fable usually catches issues in my Opus 4.8-generated code that I'd miss otherwise, but Fugu didn't. Makes me wonder if it's really at the Fable level. Hard to see the value here.
- hmokiguess 3mo agoHow do you configure it to run with pi or claude code? I'm curious to try it (via subscription ideally) EDIT: Found something here https://dev.classmethod.jp/en/articles/sakana-fugu-ga-first-touch/ https://dev.classmethod.jp/en/articles/sakana-fugu-ga-first-...
- panorama22 3mo agoIs this the beginning of the Hyperion TechnoCore?
- mark_l_watson 3mo agoNice idea but expensive. It looks like they don’t add very low cost models like DeepSeek v4 flash into their mix. After a few months of spending money on the best frontier models, now I am spending time using DeepSeek v4 flash as my workhorse, and flipping to more capable (but still very inexpensive) open models on an as-needed basis. We all make our own tool selection decisions, but for me, I feel happier and enjoy working more following the very fast response and ultra low cost path.
- ljlolel 3mo agoWe found that an all open source fusion was 1/3 the price and better than Fable https://trustedrouter.com/blog/open-fusion-beats-fable-5 https://trustedrouter.com/blog/open-fusion-beats-fable-5
- andai 3mo agoBrilliant. What this actually is, is a swarm, albeit a very small one. I'm wondering if for research specifically, swarm size (on higher temp?) would outweigh model size. At least, for the initial data gathering phase. You'd probably want a sequence of progressively larger models to filter it. Have you guys tested it on anything other than research?
- ljlolel 3mo agoWorking on bio coding and cybersecurity benchmarks now
- jordemort 3mo agoFugu, eh? So there’s a nonzero chance this thing might kill me?
- blixt 3mo agoI tried running this for some market research for my startup and it did a pretty nice job. It didn't necessarily find any obscure data, and it seemed to rely on older data than what I could find myself. On top of this, it had the same sycophantic tendencies as most LLMs these days (explaining why your idea is great and riffing on that), which I find to be unnecessary use of resources. All put together, paying ~$60 to get a hit-or-miss report seems a bit excessive, but obviously as the models they use under the hood get better it becomes more and more worth it, assuming they also improve their grounding/search capabilities. I'm a big fan of Sakana though, and have followed David Ha / @hardmaru since the world models papers (with the racing car game and the Doom clone), which were incredible at the time.
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- dancemethis 3mo agoSakana is certainly a choice of a name. In portuguese, goes from anything between "scoundrel" to "sleazebag".
- midasdf 3mo ago[dead]
- andai 3mo agoSee also: OpenRouter Fusion, similar idea, although it seems limited to internet research tasks? (Unclear, maybe someone who has used it can elaborate.) What's nice is that OpenRouter included a pareto graph showing the cost as well as the performance. (But not time, unfortunately -- model fusion adds a large factor to round trip time.) Benchmarks are a lot less helpful without that. OpenRouter: Surpassing frontier performance with fusion (blog post with benchmarks) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48525392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48525392 OpenRouter Fusion API https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48537641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48537641 See also: Sibling comment with an open source implementation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48624782#48629598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48624782#48629598 I did my own last weekend in a few lines of Python, though I haven't tested it much yet. (Looking for some very hard, very cheap benchmarks, if such a thing exists!)
- agalamli 3mo agoi've seen many AI models, tried some. i'm genuinely interested in trying this kind of model/architecture. however i'm a little confused about the pricing.
- personjerry 3mo agoI love when they put a black box in front of the other black boxes so I can get a questionably better black box for slower service and more money!
- soma8088 3mo ago$40/month on Kiro, I hardly ever hit my credit limit
- timoth3y 3mo agoFWIW, I've just published this interview with David Ha an hour ago. We talk in detail about Fugu and why these kind of routing models are likely to win out over the big frontier models. He makes some very good arguments for them. https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-future-of-ai-looks-very-different-in-japan/ https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-future-of-ai-looks-very-...
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- schmuhblaster 3mo agoI’ve been working on my own harness / “orchestration layer”, not with the goal of reaching frontier level performance, but rather boosting performance of smaller (locally hostable) models. Unfortunately, I don’t have VC money to burn on running hundreds of evals, but some preliminary results do indicate that it could work[0]. https://deepclause.substack.com/p/how-to-make-small-models-punch-way https://deepclause.substack.com/p/how-to-make-small-models-p...
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- slopdetector 3mo agoFor anyone finding this, I used this during the beta. Beats GPT-5.5 xhigh on complex tasks. Since it’s expensive and difficult to subsidize, use it for the most challenging problems. OAI/ANT can subsidize their own subscriptions, so it’s hard to compete there. But the results I got from fugu-ultra were impressive.
- teknologist 3mo agoIs this just OpenRouter Fusion but from Japan?
- Alifatisk 3mo agoI learned about this today because one HNer linked to this post, otherwise I wouldn't have noticed it. Can I just say, what a horrible title. This is probably why I didn't notice it, because it doesn't tell me anything. At least mention its some sort of a new Agent that coordinates mutliple models and acts as one, which achieves impressive scores, I don't know, something at least. Not just saying "Sakana Fugu". That's so vague. Is being mysterious supposed to catch more attention?