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Fireworks says Ember-1 keeps the answer and cuts the token bill

The Fireworks Research model is built on Kimi K3 and trained to reduce unnecessary reasoning while keeping coding and agent quality intact.

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Updated September 28, 2026

Concise Geekish brief based on Fireworks Research's Ember-1 announcement.

Generated illustration of a long AI reasoning trace being compressed into fewer output tokens
Generated image for Geekish. Source reporting: Fireworks Research's Ember-1 announcement.

What happened

Fireworks Research introduced Ember-1, a specialized model built on Kimi K3 that the company says delivers comparable quality with about 40% fewer tokens.

The company says it trained Ember-1 after more than 50 training experiments and over 200 evaluations, using Fireworks' own data rather than customer data.

Why developers care

Reasoning traces can dominate the cost of coding and agent workloads, especially when multi-turn systems keep replaying previous reasoning back into context. Fireworks argues that K3's excess reasoning could be shortened without removing the useful self-checking behavior.

In Fireworks' live A/B tests with two customers, the company says Ember-1 used about 35% fewer tokens per task at comparable quality. It is launching as a Research Preview on Fireworks Serverless, with training support also planned.

Quick takeaways

Sources