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Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

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Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#22
post #7

Fable is not a tool for the average user. It’s a professional tool for highly complex work. I would compare it to a extremely high end $15k PC, or an expensive pro-grade video camera, or a freight train, or a … I would say at least 95% of the global population will not encounter a situation once in their life where it would be actually useful/warranted.

I wish Fable were as good as you make it sound. A plan created by Fable is good, but in my case, it always contain issues caught only when it's reviewed again (whether by itself, Opus, Sol etc.). That's (almost) not different from plans created by Sol, GLM 5.3 etc. The one thing where it's genuinely better is the front-end, but then again it's far from perfect, it just needs less iterations.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#23
Reads like: brilliant Carnegie Mellon University computer science grad struggles to find job where he is not replaced by cheap, inferior Indian labor that still gets the job done, even if it takes marginally longer.

No shit we're all paying 清冲 Flash to do the grunt work. Turns out though, paying 清冲 Flash a few more cents does exactly what Ivy Wasp Pro Mythical does. Crazy how that works.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#24

[flagged]

I am because Claude has figured out I am a biochemist and therefore even asking Fable what the weather is gets me bumped back to Opus, sometimes even Opus 4.8 instead of 5. Kimi? GLM 5.3? DeepSeek? No such problem. I can literally open a new chat with just "Hello" and it gets bumped.

[dead]

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#25
post #7

Fable is not a tool for the average user. It’s a professional tool for highly complex work. I would compare it to a extremely high end $15k PC, or an expensive pro-grade video camera, or a freight train, or a … I would say at least 95% of the global population will not encounter a situation once in their life where it would be actually useful/warranted.

It works much better on regular software development e.g. for complex refactoring where cheaper models would produce a lot of garbage results.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#26

Fable is just way too expensive and limited compared to GPT 5.6 Sol, and the only task that requires that level of intelligence is frontier scientific research. I use GPT/Codex primarily for coding and usually keep Claude on Sonnet 5 most of the time as I use Claude primarily to debug/brainstorm/make frontends as a supplement to GPT.

I thought Sol was on par with Opus, so comparing it to Fable is apples and (very expensive) oranges?

I've used all three extensively.

Most of the benchmarks have exceeded their usefulness. Opus 5 beats fable 5 on many of them. Anyone who has used both models will notice immediately that this doesn't translate to the real world. Opus 5 is nothing short of a regression from Opus 4.8. Fable is genuinely a great model so long as you don't trigger a guard rail and it downgrades.

Sol in my experience isn't significantly different than fable ignoring that Sol burns usage 10x faster but the end result is hard to differentiate.

GLM 5.3 is a hair behind these two.

An anecdote but not an original one from the people I talk to.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#27
They've put themselves in a corner. Fable was too good and they gave it away with the $20 plan. It had to be a big step from Opus 4.8 to show progress, and Opus 4.8 is GREAT at coding in many different domains.

But they're getting killed on token cost. They have to get people paying more for tokens. So then they put Fable in the $200 plan and release Opus 5. I'm suspicious of Opus 5. It is mostly worse than 4.8. It _seems_ like they nerfed it to create more distance between it and Fable.

So what have most of us done? Stayed on Opus 4.8. The statistics bear this out. 4.8 still dominates.

Now they're stuck. If they take 4.8 away, everyone will riot. If they make Opus 5.x better than 4.8, they disincentivize everyone from moving to Fable and most importantly, paying more.

Really, all they can do is take the L for now and just let 4.8 be the apex of the $20 pro plan for the foreseeable future while they work like hell to make Fable THAT much better that it earns the $200 to $infinity that they really want everyone to pay.

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#28
Yeah I mean if I run out of tokens every couple of hours and have to pause my work or shell out more money I’ll switch to other tools that don’t have this problem. Though they turned this down a bit it seems, I can work with Fable reasonably now and I enjoy it actually. I think they were just testing out how much they can raise the cost without users leaving when having the best model. I guess not much after all!

Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

#29
post #7

Fable is not a tool for the average user. It’s a professional tool for highly complex work. I would compare it to a extremely high end $15k PC, or an expensive pro-grade video camera, or a freight train, or a … I would say at least 95% of the global population will not encounter a situation once in their life where it would be actually useful/warranted.

Yeah this is a fair point. I only go to it when I have some big architectural problem I want its help in working out. Or a super nasty bug.
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