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

ft.com

191–200 of 740 posts

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

#191
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 whenever doing anything related to security. Auditing code, probing systems, investigating suspicious user activity, etc.

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Data retention rules imposed by the Trump administration have also hampered Fable’s adoption, according to Ara Kharazian, chief economist at Ramp. This is in the article.

It’s far from clear to me that this is directly connected to the no-ZDR requirement. I’m heavily involved in this stuff with my company and I’ve never heard that the lack of ZDR fable is a Trump admin thing.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm going to be sad when they retire 4.6. It's not my daily driver but it's still my go-to when the other models are being stupid in one way or another (either being too verbose, or lecturing me about how what I'm asking for is evil and bad).

Hah! I was so surprised to get that "lecturing" behavior from Opus 5 too, I didn't know it was more common.

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

#195
post #179

Of course I echo the universal: Opus 5 sucks. But what also sucks is still using 4.8. Are you all seeing this? It's like the older models got dumber just before Fable and Opus 5 were coming out? I've heard the theory that it's because 4.8 is getting put on older hardware? And I imagine that just ratchets down reasoning time then possibly? Sometimes I'm just trying to sus out if I'm truly seeing things these days or g…

This is yet another reason why I think local models will win in the future. They're almost certainly A/B testing all sorts of opaque stuff that people have no clue about, hence the various 'How's Claude doing this session?' popups.

So what you are paying for may vary on a day by day basis, which is quite undesirable, even if their main goal is simply to make a better model. When it comes to a tool, I'd rather have consistent mediocrity than instability.

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

#196
I am getting close to dumping Anthropic. I like their models in general, but boy I have hit their "F you, I ain't gonna help" too many times now on innocent things. Ain't nobody wanna deal with that. I have never gotten that from Antigravity and if I did I woupd tey Codex then go to Openrouter and leave US models behind.

I mean, who says "screw you" to requests to get 35+ year old vintage computers working? Claude, that is who. Its guard rails are so stupid. I hear people trying to do simple mailing list management hit it too.

I am just about done with them.

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to be sad when they retire 4.6. It's not my daily driver but it's still my go-to when the other models are being stupid in one way or another (either being too verbose, or lecturing me about how what I'm asking for is evil and bad).

I tested all recent Opus versions and 4.6 and 4.7 were both fine FWIW. Seems 4.8 is when something started to go wrong.

That seems about right. 4.8 is like in between 4.6 and 5 in terms of capability and language and they are all pretty close honestly. I just default to using Opus 5 for a coding agent that I don't interact with and I like driving with Opus 4.6 or Fable. Fable thinks too much though. Fable is like that engineer on your team that will over-engineer the shit out of something if you let them. Fable was like, "Here are 34 yaks, which shall we shave first " and I was like can't we just... write the script first and then decide of any of these poor yaks need shaving?

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

#199
post #166

The US government basically told them they can't sell "Fable" and so they aren't. That's probably 90% of the story. Once the government stepped in, their 5th generation was effectively killed. They either had to lock it up (Mythos), neuter it (Fable), or leave people with the perception they were overpaying for a weaker model (Opus 5). Hopefully Anthropic has learned to anticipate this risk and has a plan for rollout…

What did they think was going to happen when they were actively doomsday fearmongering around the release of their own model? I assume somehow they thought this would lead to a moat with them being left safely inside the castle, but this response, and Reagan's 9 Words, were always infinitely more likely. It was a demonstration of a child-like level understanding of how regulatory capture works.

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

#200
post #102

For many coders including myself, LLM based coding agents work well enough to be useful, and in some cases worth paying for. What I don't see is vast areas of industry finding $10s to $100s of billions of value in LLMs. There's no lint or compiler that can check for correctly constructed contracts. So LLMs, which should be useful to law firms, incur a lot more manual checking of their work than coding agents. Less fo…

> What I don't see is vast areas of industry finding $10s to $100s of billions of value in LLMs. Translation between languages. That value dwarfs all programming value that can be had. Economically, culturally, scientifically, spiritually.

But translations don't require anything close to SOTA level models. Translations will be high volume, low margin transactions. That will not save Anthropic.
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