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.
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
#122They'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.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#123Where 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…
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#124Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#125Where 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 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
#126Earlier 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
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#127Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#128The 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
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
#129I’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)