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Posted by gmays 4 hours ago

Ember-1(fireworks.ai)
256 points | 144 comments
GodelNumbering 3 hours ago|
This is the golden age of model training. Some days ago, I decided I wanted a local CPU only model that can perform exceptionally well for English to Bash translation (to avoid the googling for command syntax). I got a bunch of subagents to generate large amount of training data (140k+ samples), got the Qwen 3 0.6B base model, pointed Astra at it, and off to the races. It trained for 2 days (on and off) and I got a surprisingly good model for my task! The total active time I spent was a few hours. And it is still improving, what a time to be alive!
amelius 1 hour ago||
I don't understand. If you have a model that can do bash examples already (your subagents), then why would you need to train a model?

Or are the subagents generating your training data using a closed/paid model?

Aurornis 1 hour ago|||
A very small, highly specialized model can use negligible resources (CPU, energy) to accomplish the same task.

For everyday work that happens frequently it's better to have a tiny specialized model instead of making billable API calls or turning your laptop into an 80W space heater for 20 seconds to run a general purpose model.

The large models can be used to generate synthetic training data. Tell them to make up 100,000 tasks paired with the resulting output as a 1-time cost. Then use that to train a small model.

Think of it as distillation, but focused on a specific task.

nearbuy 1 hour ago|||
Given that they're just using it to avoid the googling for bash command syntax, I'm not sure they'll save in the end against the 140k training examples they generated.
kubb 20 minutes ago|||
Good observation! It would have to be offset with O(140k) queries to the model, which is, well, unlikely.
computably 11 minutes ago||
If it's about the latency / flow disruption, spending a few hours once could easily be worth it if the result is actually good enough to skip googling/retries.
verdverm 23 minutes ago|||
you can probably generate quite a few example pairs in a single shot, you also likely don't need the best models for this either
jamienk 1 hour ago|||
This is so cool - I'm aware of this in a vague way. Can you write a little tutorial or give some good links. I want this to be the next new things I do :)
newswasboring 17 minutes ago||
Better yet package it up in a skill!
computerex 1 hour ago|||
The models he is using to generate training data are presumably commercial models. He is distilling their bash knowledge into a much smaller model he can run locally fast and cheap.
amrrs 11 minutes ago|||
Did your Astra do any RL or just SFT? did it make up any benchmark to ensure the fine-tuning was a success?
luisfmh 2 hours ago|||
Curious about how you generated the training data? Was it just asking an existing model to generate a bunch of examples?

I ask cause would this be a kind of model distillation?

I have a small model I'm looking to train on some data, and I have some real live data but I'd love to be able to extend it.

GodelNumbering 2 hours ago|||
All synthetic data. For this usecase, it was easier because all current generation LLMs, even the small models, are really good at bash commands (and SQL queries too)), so you can reasonably start batches of cheap subagents whose output is reviewed by a more capable model and merge into main training set. After 100k, I had to standing instructions to run the generation loops selectively, meaning only update samples in a given area where we see poor capability.
verdverm 18 minutes ago||
Do you have a write-up or git repo for this? Would love to learn more and/or dig into the guts

edit: others have asked any you have said "soon (tm)"

toasty228 1 hour ago|||
It is a form of distillation, as long as you're working a very narrow "trivial" topics it works perfectly.
teeskay 1 hour ago|||
If it’s one of thing that you want just for English to bash shell commands, I will create AST, it is deterministic, exceptionally fast, no tokens so no need to fine tune existing model, please let me know your thoughts.
equinumerous 2 hours ago|||
That's a really impressive result. There are all kinds of small tasks like this I use an LLM for, but theoretically if you broke all the sub-use cases into local-only models, and had something lightweight that routed to the right model, you could have faster and cheaper workflows. E.g. something trained on the linux man pages for common commands, since it's usually quicker to ask an LLM for a specific command with flags than to consult the man pages.
dominotw 1 hour ago||
> That's a really impressive result.

we dont know what the result is and how its impressive.

okamiueru 1 hour ago|||
Golden age before the age that ends humanity. Not talking about any "rogue AI", just the known statistical models of what is coming due to climate change.
verdverm 22 minutes ago||
Do those statistical models account for declining birth rates or are they based on prior population growth projections?
verdverm 32 minutes ago|||
Seriously, I'm using a Qwen 3.8 27B on the homelab, distilled from supposed Fable traces. Regardless, the difference is notable, less thinking, better output. Distilled / heavy quant is better than the original (imv)

https://huggingface.co/vwdubb/Qwen3.8-27B-Fable-Distill-NVFP...

side quest, are fable distillations only wrong when it's another country?

xhevahir 1 hour ago|||
> what a time to be alive!

It's good to hear you're enjoying yourself, but I suggest retiring that expression. It's really beginning to grate.

torginus 1 hour ago|||
Sorry for the aside, but I noticed half the usecase of AI is fixing the awful DX.
oDot 55 minutes ago|||
I appreciate the aside. Interesting observation
verdverm 19 minutes ago|||
I'm literally working on context/harness engineering right now (a set of opencode plugins)

Aside on the aside, I welcome this new era of really personal software. Not Ai's being sycophants, rather being able to easily and quickly change, adapt, or extend software I am not familiar with.

shriphani 2 hours ago|||
what hardware are you using to train?
GodelNumbering 2 hours ago||
I didn't have a local GPU, so I asked it to go out and find hardware. It found a google TPU v6e which seemed reasonably priced. I gave it my google api key. I told it to use TPU only when training and bring it down afterwards. That's about it.
libria 2 hours ago|||
> I gave it my google api key

This is the part where the narrator looks at the camera and says "Don't try this at home, kids!"

MisterMunchkin 2 hours ago|||
You’re absolutely right, I shouldn’t have rented a 200 GPU cluster for $35,000/hour. That’s on me.

[Search: Can I refund Google cloud?]

It looks like we’re not able to ask for a refund since we did actually use all of that compute intentionally.

Would you like me to write you a pleading email to send to the support team?

edot 2 hours ago||||
There’s a safer way to do this with nearly no added friction. Give it a read only API key. Then just ask it to write the API calls into a bash script and then read it and run it yourself. The agent can still inspect the live resources and diagnose and give you more commands to run. I do agree I wouldn’t give it create / write access.
bitpush 2 hours ago||||
Why? Isnt the API key scoped to a project and specifically made for this?

Are you confusing this with an OAuth token or something?

raizer88 1 hour ago||
Until astra goes bonkers and use the tpu for days
verdverm 16 minutes ago||
this is what billing caps are for

https://docs.cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets-sp...

hgoel 2 hours ago|||
I've done this sort of thing before but with Vast. Pre-deposited some money online, then let the LLM request and manage a training run on an allocation. Worked pretty well without risking bankruptcy.
otterley 2 hours ago||||
What kind of observability did you have over this process? I’m interested in how my peers are operating these efforts.
GodelNumbering 2 hours ago||
On the cloud side, nothing valuable existed, so the training couldn't ruin anything it didn't create. On the laptop side, I usually ask the agents to create named scripts for everything it needs to access, then those local script directory is green-lit with approve all. For cost, I kept giving it new budget in the 20-30 dollar increments.

I had to intervene a few times. For instance, as smart as the models are said to be (Astra), it would copy the full training run, train on the server, pull every checkpoint to the local machine, then run tests, update. So, the bandwidth bill was as high as training bill for the first 6 hours. It could have simply tested each checkpoint on the server, saved time and money, didn't occur to it until I said.

otterley 1 hour ago||
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. What kind of instrumentation and alerting, if any, did you employ to keep an eye on it?
varispeed 2 hours ago||||
> I told it to use TPU only when training and bring it down afterwards.

I wouldn't put my house on it. Brave.

shriphani 2 hours ago|||
Neat!
PEe9bB7D 2 hours ago||
i also need more info!
GodelNumbering 2 hours ago||
I am thinking about opensourcing everything, although this is not my main domain or my main startup, so the overhead of huggingface etc seems a bit unnecessary

Edit: will do as soon as possible

jack_pp 2 hours ago|||
just ask the agent to write it up if you don't have time to do a write-up yourself
equinumerous 2 hours ago||||
+1, would like to see. Even if it's not fully "ready for consumption", it's probably enough to reproduce the results.
jjice 2 hours ago||||
Please do! Small, specialized models need more love and the time you spent would be a gift!
atombender 2 hours ago|||
Would also love to read a write-up about this!
tukHelix 1 hour ago||
It’s the first time I know fireworks has a team doing model research. I do have a complex mood in that. On one hand, I’m always happy to see improvement of OSS models, whether that’s on intelligence or cost-efficiency. On the other hand, I would be a little worried about using fireworks as my API provider. Till the moment I saw this news, I had been using fireworks as my provider of deepseek v4 flash, because I thought fireworks acting as a role deploying OSS models and selling calculation resources, should be safe to use without worry of data being used for training since there’s no “conflict of interests”. But I would think twice now.
bradfa 41 minutes ago||
Just read the terms of service and read this blog post and I think your concern will be addressed.
verdverm 11 minutes ago||
https://trust.fireworks.ai/

this is our preferred open weight token vendor

this work may explain why recent models like qwen-3.8-flash and MiMo-2.6-* have not made it into their offering, which has given me reason to pause my excitement for Fireworks

slim 1 hour ago|||
That also could explain why openrouter is worth that much
owl_might_ 1 hour ago||
[flagged]
netvarun 3 hours ago||
Off topic:With sol pricing drop tbh kimi k3’s value prop has not been that great. For our internal use case/testing/benchmarks sol come out with way better quality and much cheaper costs. Kimi really needs to drop their pricing (I heard it’s set by them across all the neoclouds) Sol is at 2/10 vs kimi’s 3/15
drob518 3 hours ago||
Agreed. Even on the open weight side, GLM 5.3 has roughly equivalent performance to Kimi K3 for less than half the cost.
pornel 2 hours ago|||
Competition is good. Without K3/GLM/DS4 etc. there would be no pressure on OpenAI to drop Sol's price.
k__ 44 minutes ago|||
With DeepSeek's pricing, no other value prop has been great.
nicce 1 hour ago|||
Sol pricing dropped but so did the quality few days ago. I wonder when these companies are sued for making the terms from their side to go downwards while taking the same subscription cost.
solarkraft 1 hour ago|||
Is anybody tracking these quality changes? All I've seen so far are accusations (quite a few at this point) but not really any actual data.
pupppet 1 hour ago|||
I don’t understand how there isn’t a website out there tracking this stuff already.
bpavuk 59 minutes ago||
how the hell do we even track that? and before someone says...

—"Benchmarks!"

...I'll tell that they can be gamed so easily, and they are on a consistent basis.

nicce 1 hour ago|||
In a Codex subreddit there is a bunch of stats.
nostrebored 3 hours ago|||
Agreed, I think the only place where it’s still interesting is ui design. Visually kimi and muse feel much nicer than frontier models to me, but maybe it’s an artifact of everything terrible being Claude Design
7777777phil 1 hour ago|||
I was surprised by that. I run my benchmark [1] every couple of days and was sure this model will be ath the pareto frontier, if not THE pareto frontier. But no:

Ember isn't picked yet. In planning, Opus 5.5 wins under the planning weights. In code, GPT-6 Sol dominates it: also 10/10, but with a higher quality score and a lower estimated cost. Ember has no intelligence index, so its starting score is only 0.73, which holds its 10/10 down to 0.954 against Sol's 0.975.

[1] https://philippdubach.com/posts/jev-model-router-for-pi/

toasty228 1 hour ago||
> With sol pricing drop

6 or 5.6? Because 6 is hot garbage

jamienk 3 hours ago||
Ignoring for the moment issues of what "counts" as open, won't open models rapidly advance due to stuff like this in ways that it's less possible for the proprietary ones to do? This is exactly how Linux & Wikipedia, for example, overtook their "frontiers", right?
andsoitis 3 hours ago||
> Ignoring for the moment issues of what "counts" as open, won't open models rapidly advance due to stuff like this in ways that it's less possible for the proprietary ones to do? This is exactly how Linux & Wikipedia, for example, overtook their "frontiers", right?

I suspect the advantage that catapulted Linux ahead of the establishment was less technical potential and talent and more organizational advantage. That's not to diminish the technical talent of the Linux crew, but them being unencumbered gave them more degrees of freedom. The rest is history.

So as long as the AI companies don't succumb to "big company" dynamics, they can outlead. To wit: Open AI and Anthropic are kicking Google's ass.

mirekrusin 2 hours ago|||
I think people make mistake here, google’s approach is not to spend $2.3 on every $1.0 earned, they’re riding on serving to masses “luna”, they absolutely have way more powerful models internally but they don’t clutter their infrastructure with fragile and costly intelligence-of-size inference frontier. I think “underdog” perception is illusory/temporary, not stupidity - calculated, conscious, longer term bet.
bpavuk 49 minutes ago||
I tend to agree, but I also should highlight how expensive this shit really is.

in one month, Google actually went cash-negative. [0] even still, they are subsidizing their stuff a lot less, have the most opaque and variable limits, and increase adoption through bundling and shuffling features. I can't even share my Google One storage without subscribing to a Google AI plan anymore, but previously any plan except Google One Lite was shareable.

if you tell me that's not enough to go after frontier, then how much money are Anthropic and OpenAI burning?

[0]: https://www.techspot.com/news/113214-google-records-first-ne...

jamienk 3 hours ago|||
Diff people have diff motives to experiment, then new work is done on top of stuff that "hits" in a way no one anticipated. Then work gets piled on top in a way that might make it hard to port
andsoitis 3 hours ago||
> then new work is done on top of stuff that "hits" in a way no one anticipated.

Indeed. And when you have freedom to play, you are able to find new stepping stones that you didn't anticipate. And you can combine stepping stones in new ways to make new discoveries.

Greatness cannot be planned.

segmondy 3 hours ago|||
No, because close labs/models borrow but don't contribute back.
ssivark 2 hours ago|||
This was exactly the crux of Nathan Lambert's recent testimony to a group of US Congressional members/staff: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/the-current-balance-of-power-...
swagatkonchada 3 hours ago|||
Won't the "frontier" labs figure out whatever techniques were used and apply them to their closed models?
cyanydeez 2 hours ago|||
Like how the last 2 decades of tech companies are thinly veiled open source pilfering into business units.
sincerely 54 minutes ago||
"Oh darn, you know that thing I made and released with explicit, precise language defining who can use it and what, if any, restrictions apply? Well now someone is using it in complete accordance with those conditions I set out, and that's somehow making me upset"
k__ 2 hours ago|||
If they can keep up.

The lock-in is less pronounced as it is with AWS or MS.

zeroq 3 hours ago|||
The difference between contributing to OS and AI, is that the first is a hobby alternative to woodworking or hiking, while the other can easily bootstrap you a company you can get millions in investment, at least for time being.
intothemild 3 hours ago||
Yes, absolutely, but only if people keep contributing in the open.
jack_pp 3 hours ago||
not necessarily, just knowing something is possible will motivate others to achieve it somehow. Which is why there are so many LLMs and OAI doesn't have a monopoly
dijit 54 minutes ago||
Given what an experience i had with Ember-2… I’m not sure I’d want to engage with its predecessor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exapunks?wprov=sfti1

Arcuru 2 hours ago||
Over on /r/LocalLLaMA there's a group that's been getting popular doing the same thing for the Qwen 27B (and other) models. - https://huggingface.co/ukisai
tangled 1 hour ago||
What am I missing here? I think of fireworks as an inference provider serving open weights model. The value that they primarily provide to customers is that (i) they improve reliability by balancing across a bunch of clouds/neoclouds, (ii) they get better pricing by buying capacity in bulk, and (iii) they reduce operational costs. So far so good.

I can also see the argument for providing a post-training service from a customer acquisition perspective: "hey, we can fine-tune this open weights model, so it both gives better/more predictable results than OpenAI/Anthropic and also is cheaper. And btw, once we've won your business, please run this model on our infra."

But what I'm struggling to understand is fireworks spending a bunch of money (on salaries and compute) releasing a frontier model that is going to rapidly fall behind the frontier. Is this "just" advertising for them, both for customers and also for hiring? Or are they actually trying to stay on the frontier? If so, to what end?

criemen 1 hour ago||
> to what end?

I'd expect that their business strategy is to compete in more markets, and if successful, they can capture more value. This is the "easiest" for them as they already have GPUs, a training environment etc. For that platform it's not the worst if there's an internal customer team that can help shape the future and provide immediate feedback, and if it results in a good model, even better.

Other things I'd not be surprised they offer in the future in the same vein: A multi-model harness, coding agent (cloud and local), and maybe at a later point in time even a CPU-only cloud compute product.

danielmarkbruce 1 hour ago|||
The end: make lots of money. The means: systematically take existing reasoning models, do some more post-training of some sort to make them achieve the same outputs with less reasoning tokens (ie, cheaper). Same quality but cheaper is always valuable.

It's unclear if they can do this systematically and it's unclear if they can do it better than others. But, lots of things are unclear in AI at the moment, this doesn't seem outrageous on the surface. And, it could just be marketing. And it could be the first option with the backup of the second.

TomasEkeli 1 hour ago|||
I think they are trying to show potential customers what is possible.
k__ 42 minutes ago||
Vertical integration.
nico 3 hours ago||
> The problem: thinking models think too much

This is partly the appeal of Jev et al; having a quick model for simple tasks, that doesn’t require that much thinking

It’s amazing all the workflows that models like that can unlock. And yes, classifiers and other ML models have been around for a while for these types of tasks, but Jev has made it easy and cheap to play and experiment. This in turn, is incentivizing people to try them for a bunch of stuff, unlocking creativity and producing a lot of new cool (and eventually potentially very useful) applications

demibabs 3 hours ago||
What are the useful applications of Jev so far? Not to sound dismissive, I just haven’t seen what people are using it for yet.
vulture916 1 hour ago|||
Here's a third-party (not Jev) showcase of things people built, which helped me kind of get the appeal. https://bentossell.com/jev/ (not mine).
neosat 3 hours ago|||
Lots of use cases! I've personally used it for the following:

1. Evals (once you have your rubric defined and tuned using a reasoning model, jev can be great for running periodic evals especially those that run daily.

2. e-commerce catalog classification 3. quick search using anything as context and query mapping to a pre-defined set.

computerex 1 hour ago||
At least for 1, evils, you’d want to use a good old reasoning model to get the best eval results.
elcomet 2 hours ago||
Why not using a cheap LLM with thinking completely disabled ? I don't think it will be much more expensive than jev.
nico 2 hours ago|||
I’ve tested this with some local LLMs and their accuracy is in general better than Jev/Laya, but they are super slow in comparison as well

For example, a typical/stock LLM can’t really play Doom in real time, but a Jev-like model can. Just because of latency

Of course, if you want the best Doom player, there are way better and faster adhoc models

ssivark 2 hours ago|||
LLM inference has two very different regimes of work: prefill & decode. You can think of the former roughly as processing a pre-specified prompt, and the latter as sequential processing (auto-regressive token generation) eg. "chain of thought". The latter is very important for LLMs and cannot be ignored; it deeply influences infra design, even necessitates copious amounts of high-bandwidth memory. Jev-like models can ignore the latter and therefore optimize much better for the former, consequently operating at both better cost and latency.
andsoitis 3 hours ago||
> The problem: thinking models think too much

Analysis paralysis stifles not just human intelligence, but other intelligences too.

minimaxir 2 hours ago||
The thinking traces on some Chinese models just output the full response in the thinking trace, then output it again to the user, which is redundant.
AraneaDev 2 hours ago||
Yes and thar makes you wonder if the Paradox of Choice would apply as well ;)

The more options you have, the harder it becomes to be satisfied with the one you picked.

qeternity 49 minutes ago|
This is undoubtedly great. But most of the inference cost today for dominant use cases (agentic coding) are in the prefill, not the decode. This is one of the reasons that DeepSeek is so aggressively optimizing prefill and caching.
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