The market correcting itself.
Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
111–120 of 740 posts
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#112They'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 _…
I kind of still chill out on Opus 4.6 too. 4.8 is good too. I go between them. Opus 4.8 is a little smarter some of the time. Their use of language is both very different from Opus 5. Some of the time I have a hard time believing Opus 5 is even related to Opus 4.6 and 4.8.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#113Where Anthropic f'ed up was treating their monetization the way they treat model training. Turns out that success in experimentation is not transferrable.
They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling:
"You can only use Fable for a week as a part of your plan" "Be ready! You have to start paying per token!" "Nevermind! we extended it for a couple more weeks" "Wait, now it's up to half your usage" "Ok, now its..."
Most people want to not care. We want our AI like electricity -- Kind of just there no matter how easy/hard is for the supply. You don't want your electricity company to be on the brink of cutting you off any second.
That's Anthropic. You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game. That forces people to look beyond the walled garden. There, they find models that are fine... and without the shenanigans.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#114I see variations of this post all over X. Fable doesn't get much usage, since Opus 5 is like 99% as good at a lower price point. And perhaps more importantly also faster.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#115Anthropic’s issue is churn because of the peak verbosity vomit coming out of Opus 5/Mythos/Fable. What the hell did they train it on. The sane model is still Opus 4.6.
https://x.com/wolframs91/status/2090159644849353058 What if: - Opus 4.6 was the last Opus generation that got a lot of use by Anthropic's own employees - After that they primarily used Mythos internally - 4.7, 4.8 and 5 were RLAIFd by Mythos "teachers" - Hence why 4.6 is the last Opus gen who doesn't report back like a robot wanting to cover every potential hole another AI system would've spotted and criticized - Hen…
Commented elsewhere, I still use Opus 4.6 because it is the only model that feels decent to interact with. 4.8 is decent and some times smarter but you can see it trending towards Opus 5 levels of nonsense. I use Opus 5 when I don't need to interact. Fable or Opus 4.6 are the only Anthropic models I like interacting with ATM.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#116I’m not sure if the underlying data is counting subscription use for Fable, which is where a lot of people are using it because token pricing is very expensive. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was counting enterprise token usage only. As rich as enterprise customers are, they’re not exactly willing to double the cost of SWE salaries on tokens. Either way, a model used to solve the top 10% of problems that people use…
Very much agree on Fable. Over the past month or so it has shown to be the only Anthropic model that can understand a largish dbt model codebase. Opus 5 gets almost everything wrong. (High reasoning on both)
Wouldn’t you need to bump opus reasoning a few levels to be apples to apples?
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#117My company still hasn’t been able to deploy wide access to Fable because it’s not available on a ZDR basis. This wasn’t mentioned in the article but I imagine this factor is not irrelevant.
Same for me, they’re not offering it with the same data residency features of Opus, many enterprise companies can’t accept compromises.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#118Opus 5 is by far the best model for everything that matters to me. But it’s just too expensive. Terra 5.6 is bearable for everyday tasks, so now it’s my default.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#119im using fable almost exclusively, i just buy a new 200$ license if i run out of capacity. its so much better, easily worth it given how much work I get done. I built a code, deploy, e2e test loop with my full aws infra, fable just implements linear tasks constantly, 5 at a time, tests the whole thing end to end if people dont see why they need a model this smart, they probably arent using ai enough
People have realized you don't always need a Fable level model. Majority of my work is sufficient with ChatGPT Luna which has effectively unlimited usage on the $100 ChatGPT plan. I am not doing awfully complex tasks though. I imagine a lot of other people are in a similar boat, either switching from Claude to ChatGPT or even just min-maxing DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 or similar.
the code quality is higher though, so the value compounds. i dont need to watch as closely to what its doing, so its more autonomous
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#120Where Anthropic f'ed up was treating their monetization the way they treat model training. Turns out that success in experimentation is not transferrable. They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling: "You can only use Fable for a week as a part of your plan" "Be ready! You have to start paying per token!" "Nevermind…
It’s almost like they’re trying to sell a solution looking for a problem! Startup lesson #1, don’t do that.