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

ft.com

121–130 of 740 posts

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

#121

My 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.

This is the biggest factor. FT (or the analysts it cites) fumbled the ball in this article.

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

#122
post #64
post #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 _…

And they've hobble Fable and Opus so hard with their safety guardrails, I ask innocuous questions and tasks and they get flagged so often I gave up on it. I can get all the work I need done in GPT5.5 or 5.6 without the hassle. I just kept a $20 plan going for use on my phone.

They also made Fable no longer ZDR for businesses which killed tons of demand for it.

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

#123
post #113

Where 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…

The fact is that demand for tokens at electric bill rates so far outstrips what can be supplied currently not just with frontier models, but with open weights cheap models too. Running an always on Deepseek flash agent would cost three figures a month at API prices.

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

#125
post #113

Where 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…

Yeah, I agree with this. The constant state of "...will the rug be pulled?!?" does discourage relying on it as a model and building a workflow on it. Anthropic used to just be a reliable thing you could play with. Now it's this constant source of anxiety.

It also didn't help that the government yanked it which adds another source of anxiety since OpenAI is on much better terms with the administration and the administration seems corrupt enough that they would mess with Anthropic if they got a big enough donation from OpenAI.

But anyway after Sol entered the picture, I don't think Anthropic can get away with this as much and I also think they're going to face a massive backlash from Max subscribers if they do end up ending the +50% promotion at the end of the month because Sol is a Fable peer and priced very competitively.

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

#126
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had Fable bail on me because I used the word autopilot on a project. Changed to something unrelated, and off we went.

I haven’t hit the Fable guardrails a single time after substantial usage. And I’m working on a ML project (a game AI). I don’t doubt people are hitting it… shrugs

I hit it once when I asked a question about whether butterflies remember anything from their time as caterpillars. I've never hit it for coding, but I also don't really do much related to security.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intriguing. Who is it? What is it? any ideas? https://openrouter.ai/stealth/ox-alpha

Rumored to be mimo

Are you sure, most indicators suggest Z.ai with a potentially Flash or Air variant of GLM 5.3?

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

#128
post #66

The problem is that they are not solving the problem they ought to be solving. I don't want Shakespeare, I want Bob the builder. Half of my work is telling claude how to behave. I'm pretty certain they have enough _data_ to realize people do the same thing time and time again. Check this comment of mine for a better explanation of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413353

They already do, extensively. Its not Shakespeare, in fact, it sucks at prose and creativity, like most newer llms.

But people are not as alike as you think. I doubt I share your unique preferences.

That said, I don't spend much time telling it how to behave. Are you sure you're not fighting the default system prompt?

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

#129
post #106
post #70

I’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)

More importantly other way cheaper models can do what Opus 5 does. So you can pay for Claude to use Fable 5 exclusively for harder stuff and planning, then get the same value you'd otherwise get from switching back to Opus by using other cheap LLMs for day-to-day coding tasks.
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