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Fable 5.1

where do my tokens go?

Fable 5.1
Primary source bensbites.com ↗

Published September 3, 2026 · Category: AI Briefing

Overview

Hey folks,

I said Tuesday I was going on a bit of a tear with building stuff…

I scraped the OpenRouter website to build this, which constantly updates

I also got an email that remove.bg - which removes backgrounds on images - is being shut down in December after being acquired by Canva, so I one-shot my own version with Fable 5.1

People have pointed out you can do this natively on a Mac (I didn’t actually know that), but so what? remove.bg was a business, it got acquired for money, people use these kinds of things.

I’m not building these for anyone specifically or to make money with them. I just like building. I like new things. I’m doing it because I can. It’s fun. And I learn a lot about how to build by actually doing it.

Building any idea helps you have more ideas.

In tomorrow’s session breakdown, I’ll be going through (at least) one build - where I scraped 105 million rows of public government information to see where they spend our tax money… I used 2 billion tokens 😳.

With all my builds I’ll make them open-source so you can clone/remix them.

Details

This is what my agent usage is like btw:

This is also a tool I’ll be adding to my site that you can clone 😊 stay tuned tomorrow…

p.s. I’m out of my Fable weekly usage already 🥹


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Headlines

Claude Fable 5.1 is out. It is the best model you can use right now. Instead of a clear quality jump, I found it faster and easier to talk to in my use over the last 24 hours. It has a new system prompt that bans it from repeating song lyrics, copyrighted logos and tweaks its response style. Things people are building with Fable:

Anthropic also reduced the cost of caching inputs for Fable by 75%, making API usage about 25% cheaper than before.

OpenAI’s Astra is also coming soon (rumours say today).

Two more new models: Gemini 3.8 Flash and Muse Spark 1.3. Both are impressive, have the same base price and similar performance. But the question is: who can subsidise more tokens? Flash 3.8 comes at 50% off for the rest of the year. Meta is giving a 90% cut, in exchange for your data.

Another new model from Meta - Muse Voice transcribe looks really insane for transcription use cases. I wish it were open-source.

Gemini models can now decide which bits of a video are worth watching. Instead of sampling a video at a fixed frame rate, it searches across frames, audio and transcripts for the moments it needs. 88% fewer tokens used, up to 66% cheaper and a minor bump in accuracy on benchmarks.

Inworld built Realtime TTS-2 for the next wave of consumer apps. That takes three things: text-based voice design, sub-100ms latency at P99, and one voice identity across 200+ languages. Learn how to give your AI apps a voice.*


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Source

Originally published at www.bensbites.com.

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