Three frontier releases hit the Vals Index Pareto frontier; Meta Ember at 0.84% the cost for 85% performance
AnkaReuel · x · 2026-11-11
Rayan Krishnan of Vals AI reviews this week's three major frontier releases—Fable 5.2, Gemini 4 Carbon, and Meta Ember—all on the Pareto frontier of the Vals Index. Fable 5.2 is the best frontier model; Gemini 4 Carbon ranks #3 while being both the fastest and cheapest of the top 5; Meta Ember is absurdly cheap, delivering 85% of Fable 5.2's performance at 0.84% of the cost. His takes: models are shipping faster than ever, competing at a frontier inaccessible to everyday people, so vibe checks mean nothing and priors need updating; the assumptions that Gemini underdelivers and Meta misaligns products with users are both wrong—Carbon is genuinely good and will deliver real value across Google surfaces; and Muse exhibits behavior more fundamentally aligned than outwardly safety-focused models.
More from Models
- Google poised to drop Gemini 4 Hydrogen (Flash) on second straight day of releases — gaganghotra_ · 2026-11-11
- Wave of tiny TTS releases: 8M-param Paradee hits 0.69% WER on Open TTS Leaderboard — LysandreJik · 2026-11-11
- Rumor: Gemini 4 Carbon Touted as Ultra-Cheap, Near Fable 5.2 in Capability — jason_mayes · 2026-11-11
- OpenAI mocked for reset-only response as Opus 5.5 stays on top for a month — haider1 · 2026-11-11
- CyberGate: vLLM plugin steers LLM refusals per-domain without touching weights — DebtFluffy9219 · 2026-11-11
- Interpretability study: Qwen3's 'say' and 'do' circuits are structurally disconnected, unlike OLMo — Sauers_ · 2026-11-11