Samaya AI Releases Sterling: A 3B-Active Finance Research Agent Model that Beats Claude Fable 5.1 on FrontierFinance at 11x Lower Cost

Samaya AI released Samaya Sterling, a LoRA post-trained version of NVIDIA's Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (30B total, 3B active parameters) tuned as a financial research agent. On Samaya's self-reported FrontierFinance benchmark, Sterling scores 58.9% (60.6% in high-effort mode) versus 55.9% for Claude Fable 5.1, at $0.61 per question against $6.89. Training used LoRA on Tinker across two SFT stages and two GRPO stages, with a harness adapted for the small model.