Fusion vs Fugu Mini

What I tested — same prompt, two models

I run the same fixed prompt set through every new model the day it drops — same string, one shot, single HTML file out — and I score the result 0–10 on whether it ran, how close it hit the brief, and how good it looked. Below is what came out when I gave the exact same prompts to Fusion and Fugu Mini, side by side, on 37 shared tasks inside the Agent Operating System.

Both models were given identical prompts inside the Agent Operating System — no help, no iteration, no "best of N" tricks. I run each prompt once, save the HTML file the model produces, and score it 0–10 on whether it ran, how close it hit the brief, and how good it looked. The scoring is mine. The verdicts below are pulled from my source comparison guides at agentos.guide where I publish every score and the reasoning behind it.

Fusion · Dispatched from Agent OS for research-heavy prompts where ensemble accuracy outweighs single-model speed.

Fugu Mini · Dispatched from Agent OS as the fast Sakana lane. Bench scored by Claude judge against the same 42 prompts.

Where Fusion beat Fugu Mini

The tasks where I gave Fusion a higher 0–10 score on the same prompt — with the actual commentary from my source guides.

Where Fugu Mini beat Fusion

The tasks where I gave Fugu Mini a higher 0–10 score on the same prompt — with the actual commentary from my source guides.

Strengths & weaknesses I logged

Pricing & context — the spec sheet

The verdict — which should you pick?

Across 36 scored shared tasks, Fusion averaged 8.54/10, beating Fugu Mini's 7.75/10 by 0.79 points. Pick Fusion when the build has to ship on the first prompt and you can afford the trade-offs in the comparison below.

If you only run one of these inside your stack, the head-to-head average above is the call. If you can run both, my honest play is to wire Fusion and Fugu Mini both into the Agent Operating System and dispatch each from the kanban by task type — deep-research workflows where panel consensus beats single-model answers → Fusion, agent loops where latency matters more than panel consensus → Fugu Mini. That's the same setup I run for the 4,000+ founders inside the AI Profit Boardroom.

FAQ — Fusion vs Fugu Mini

Which is better, Fusion or Fugu Mini?

On Goldie Bench, Fusion averages 8.54/10 across the shared tasks, with 21 gold, 3 silver, 3 bronze overall. Fugu Mini averages 7.75/10, with 2 gold, 0 silver, 1 bronze. Fusion wins the head-to-head 25–3.

How much does Fusion cost vs Fugu Mini?

Fusion: OpenRouter's Fusion API dispatches a single prompt to multiple frontier models and ensembles the answers. Premium panel: Fable 5 + GPT-5.5. Budget panel: cheaper open-weights models. Roughly half the per-token cost of a Fable 5 solo call. Fugu Mini: The non-Ultra `fugu` model on Sakana's API. Sakana describes it as 'Fast mini model optimized for low latency yet high quality responses.' Crucially: zero orchestration tokens per call (vs Ultra's panel of thousands). Returns in ~3 min instead of 6-15 min and doesn't time out on heavy prompts.

What's the context window for Fusion vs Fugu Mini?

Fusion has a Varies — depends on which panel models are dispatched context window. Fugu Mini has a Single-model variant of Sakana's Fugu — no panel orchestration. Same API endpoint, much faster per call. context window.

When should I pick Fusion over Fugu Mini?

Pick Fusion for: Deep-research workflows where panel consensus beats single-model answers; Cost-sensitive operators who want Fable-5-class output at ~half the bill; Production agents that benefit from vendor-redundancy on every call. The trade-off is the weaknesses we logged on the bench: Ensemble latency higher than any single model (panel calls run in parallel but the slowest still gates the response); No per-task goldiebench scoring yet — bench rank pending.

When should I pick Fugu Mini over Fusion?

Pick Fugu Mini for: Agent loops where latency matters more than panel consensus; Quick first-drafts you'll refine downstream; Filling out a bench when Ultra is timing out. The trade-off is the weaknesses we logged on the bench: Single model only — no ensemble verdict; Newer than Ultra — less calibration / verification.

How does Goldie Bench score Fusion vs Fugu Mini?

Every demo on this page was built by Julian Goldie inside the Agent Operating System — same fixed prompt for both models, one shot, single HTML file out. Each result gets a 0–10 score on whether it ran, how close it hit the brief, and how good it looked. The highest score on each task gets gold; second gets silver; third gets bronze. See methodology for full provenance.

Related comparisons

Other head-to-heads using the same scoring system:

Full model pages: Fusion · Fugu Mini · back to the leaderboard