You needed to search all of them to find something decent.
That's roughly analogous to today. Ignoring cost, you'd be way better off asking all the LLMs to solve a problem (like coding) where you can verify the answer.
So the question is, for things like that -> can a group of models perform better than frontier models, especially at a reasonable cost?
Fable is not a great value, so unless you're trying to find answers to Erdos questions, you can probably do better on cost.
You can probably typically ask 3 or 4 of the top Chinese models for an answer and get a response for the same Fable question... Given that Fable isn't that much better, it's not surprising you can do better for a large subset of problems.