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The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

combine-lab.github.io

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Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#51

I asked it a question about indoor carbon dioxide levels (wholly innocuous question), which it flagged as involving biology, therefore downgraded to Opus. It's a pretty good strategy if they're hoping to fail as a business, I guess.

I think they're not testing Fable as much as they're testing guardrails which they can later apply to anything they want.

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#52
post #24
post #15

The honest way to say this is that Fable is not useful for bio-related work. The author is working on processing RNA sequences and similar biology tasks, and Fable's classifier has a hair trigger on those tasks.

The author is working on an opensource C++ codebase and not on biology tasks. The work is around tooling. It's like saying well a scalpel is used for medical reasons, sure. But manufacturing scalpels is metalworking, not medicine.

I think it's accurate to characterize the project as bio-related work: https://github.com/COMBINE-lab/salmon

> salmon is a wicked-fast program for highly-accurate, transcript-level quantification from RNA-seq data. It pairs a fast mapping stage — selective alignment, or alignment-free sketch mode (--sketch) — with a massively-parallel statistical model (EM/VBEM over equivalence classes) to estimate transcript abundances. You can give salmon raw sequencing reads, or regular alignments to the transcriptome (an unsorted BAM), and it uses the same inference engine either way.

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#54
For anyone using these models for anything remotely sensitive, keep in mind that Anthropic says [0]:

> We retain inputs and outputs for up to 2 years and trust and safety classification scores for up to 7 years if your chat is flagged by our automated trust and safety systems as violating our Usage Policy.

And, since those automated systems apparently have a ludicrous false-positive rate, you should assume that your inputs and outputs are being retained for 2 years even if you are doing nothing that any reasonable person would consider to be problematic.

Oh, and they'll train on that data [1]:

> We will use your chats and coding sessions (including to improve our models) if:

>You choose to allow us to use your chats and coding sessions to improve Claude, learn more here

> Your conversations are flagged for safety review (in which case we may use or analyze them to improve our ability to detect and enforce our Usage Policy, including training models for use by our Safeguards team, consistent with Anthropic’s safety mission)

It appears that the usual controls (including for businesses) to prevent Anthropic from training on your data will not apply.

[0] https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/7996866-how-long-do-y...

[1] https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023580-is-my-data-u...

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#56
post #47

Fable was refusing to patch vllm for me when trying to get mtp to work on r9700 gpus. Kept on bumping down to opus. Tried to really sanitize my prompts and everything but it seemed intrinsically prohibited from doing this sort of work. I guess it’s useful for making inane one shot games and websites, lol.

Anthropic's TOS clearly says they don't want to facilitate any sort of distillation, it's not a stretch to think they will limit any sort of learning on improving other models.

Literally pulling the ladder up.

Disgusting behavior.

I like the product, I hate the company. I can't wait for competition.

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#57
post #13
post #5

This post can essentially be distilled down to: yes, Fable's classifier (which is meant to downgrade cybersecurity, biology, or jailbreak attempts to Opus 4.8) is definitely overly sensitive to the point of uselessness. e.g. a colleague asked Fable to help create an simple app to help calculate the statistics for phase II and III trials. (Ignoring that such things already exist) it passed his request down to Opus, de…

Anyone test the "Gay" jailbreak to see if it works on Fable?

Given the export fears, might want to make that a gay Israelite just to be safe.

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#58
The classifier for biology is so broad it makes me wonder what kind of stuff mythos was generating. Anthropic is known to be a bit dramatic, but they wouldn't have released something this broad unless they saw the model cross a significant threshold that scared them.

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#59
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem here is that LLMs aren’t really “intelligence models” but more like “knowledge models”. LLMs don’t “think”, they just use a clever trick to make it seem like they do. I might not understand a lot about current state of AI, but that’s what they seem to be. Give it information and ask to organise it and make links, and they’ll do it, but that’s it, they don’t continually try to get out of the knowle…

Feels like a distinction without a difference. What is any intelligence but a sum of its knowledge?

> Feels like a distinction without a difference. What is any intelligence but a sum of its knowledge?

In humans, there is a standard distinction between fluid intelligence (ability to solve problems in the absence of background information) and crystallised intelligence (having more facts and learned skills in your head)

Re: The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous

#60
post #5

This post can essentially be distilled down to: yes, Fable's classifier (which is meant to downgrade cybersecurity, biology, or jailbreak attempts to Opus 4.8) is definitely overly sensitive to the point of uselessness. e.g. a colleague asked Fable to help create an simple app to help calculate the statistics for phase II and III trials. (Ignoring that such things already exist) it passed his request down to Opus, de…

I'm working on cryptography, all from academic research papers. Started well, but it eventually got some word into its context that is on the banlist. I found that if you tell it to fire off clean Fable subagents and you instruct it to check the Claude Code billing data to check for downgrades, you can get most high-sensitivity spec/review tasks done with Fable. Most.

I figure that once GPT 5.6 comes out, Anthropic will become interested in making the safety gate non-destructive.

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