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Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1

anthropic.com

121–130 of 1001 posts

Re: Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1

#121

(I work at Anthropic) Beyond all the benchmarks, I think Fable 5.1 is a big improvement in writing style. It sounds a lot less stereotypically like other Claude models, has (imho) a much more natural style, and responds to my style instructions more reliably. More work to be done (and we will!) but reading better prose makes me so much happier. Another point I expect not to get much attention until it all happens at…

I have a pet theory that the Opus prose style/smell we all have grown weary of is due at least in part to the models writing more for themselves and each other than for humans. They're packing lots of signal into fewer words and they don't care if it sounds cringe because it works better as glue in long-running tasks.

I'm also thinking of the 2017 novel "Void Star" where AIs who operate everything have long since left ceased bothering with human languages, and it takes a rare sort of direct matrix-gazing savant to be able to try and horse-whisper them into doing or revealing anything they didn't already plan to do.

Re: Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1

#122

"Cache reads now cost 75% less, or $0.25 per million tokens." For me, at a typical 95% cache hit rate, I think my optimal context window size before autocompaction goes from ~200K to ~400K tokens. Great for longer horizon tasks.

looks like it is only for api.....

Oh dang, that's really unfortunate, nice catch. At least Claude subscription users got a usage reset. But yeah, I can't help but feel Codex is far more generous with their subscription quota at the moment. I've been using Fable to orchestrate GPT Sol Max and Sol Ultra agents all day, and I've barely made a dent.

Re: Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1

#123
post #35

“ Claude Fable 5.1's writing is generally a step up from earlier Claude models, with fewer stock phrases and less unexplained jargon. In some cases, though, its prose is denser than Claude Fable 5's: sentences run longer and there are fewer paragraph breaks.” I cancelled my pro max Claude subscription last week; codex is much more succinct. I am curious if this is getting better. I don’t think Anthropic realizes that…

I've developed a habit of adding into my prompts "please keep your response concise and succinct" or "I'm trying to cram, please only provide the minimum level of technical detail necessary to understand this topic" I find it helps immensely but it'd be nice if I didn't have to do that.

I don't understand that complaint, although it seems to be a common one. The whole problem with the way models talk nowadays is that they are succinct to a fault, going to the extent of coining new buzzwords and misusing existing ones. What I want to see is a shift towards plain language.

Re: Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. I would trade some stupidity (say ten points on any benchmark) in exchange for a version of Opus or a similar model that actually gave me direct, concise answers.

You can possibly give instructions on how to respond to your questions.

Yes, and they will work ... for like two turns, after which Claude will go back to its usual wall of text.

And yes you could add context (memories, rules, CLAUDE.md entries, etc.): they won't help (for long). Same for hooks that remind Claude to be concise: it gets "attenuated" and starts ignoring any such instructions quickly. There's also writing guidelines ... but they're basically just more context with slightly higher weights (ie. Claude will still ignore them).

I've even gone so far as to make a hook that identifies long responses and requests shorter versions (which is challenging in itself, as you need to run another lower-powered model to evaluate how long is "too long", as what's "long" when the expected answer is one line is different from what's expected for a ten line answer). However, that just shows you the long version, then some hook text, then (10-15 seconds later) it shows the short version. So I created a proxy that hid the long version/hook text for me ... but I had to abandon it because all that used up so much usage I was running out.

I'm fuzzy on the details, but Caveman somehow "hacks" Claude in a way that gets past all that ... but it takes things too far in that direction, with "cave man" speech that sucks.

Re: Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1

#125

(I work at Anthropic) Beyond all the benchmarks, I think Fable 5.1 is a big improvement in writing style. It sounds a lot less stereotypically like other Claude models, has (imho) a much more natural style, and responds to my style instructions more reliably. More work to be done (and we will!) but reading better prose makes me so much happier. Another point I expect not to get much attention until it all happens at…

This post and comment makes me believe "science" is the new "code" for Anthropic now that the code advantage is mostly gone and lost for OpenAI, ie. they got much better and Claude become significantly worse over these months.

Re: Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1

#126

(I work at Anthropic) Beyond all the benchmarks, I think Fable 5.1 is a big improvement in writing style. It sounds a lot less stereotypically like other Claude models, has (imho) a much more natural style, and responds to my style instructions more reliably. More work to be done (and we will!) but reading better prose makes me so much happier. Another point I expect not to get much attention until it all happens at…

Too bad. I see the stereotypical prose as a good thing. When I interact with Claude myself, I don’t mind it as it just feels like Claude’s distinctive voice. But when other people try to disguise LLM output as their own thoughts, the voice makes it easier for me to tell.

Re: Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1

#128
post #35

“ Claude Fable 5.1's writing is generally a step up from earlier Claude models, with fewer stock phrases and less unexplained jargon. In some cases, though, its prose is denser than Claude Fable 5's: sentences run longer and there are fewer paragraph breaks.” I cancelled my pro max Claude subscription last week; codex is much more succinct. I am curious if this is getting better. I don’t think Anthropic realizes that…

> In some cases, though, its prose is denser than Claude Fable 5's: sentences run longer and there are fewer paragraph breaks

that feels like they just blocked words like load-bearing but can't actually fix the real problem. The insane word slop density and run on sentences was the real reason it became annoying to work with claude, colored with way too many analogies and pointless linguistic comparisons.

Re: Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1

#129
post #35

“ Claude Fable 5.1's writing is generally a step up from earlier Claude models, with fewer stock phrases and less unexplained jargon. In some cases, though, its prose is denser than Claude Fable 5's: sentences run longer and there are fewer paragraph breaks.” I cancelled my pro max Claude subscription last week; codex is much more succinct. I am curious if this is getting better. I don’t think Anthropic realizes that…

One thing I've noticed and HATE, is that when you increase thinking-effort, that seemingly increases response-length. Meaning that X.High is longer than High, which is longer than Medium, etc. Which is kind of the inverse of how people work; a really smart person can condense difficult ideas into simple[r] terms. Whereas people who struggle speak a lot but say very little. High/X.High do seem to deliver better qualit…

With LLMs, you're still mostly read things "off the tip of the tongue". A better comparison is observing a smart person talking to themselves while working on a tough problem.

EDIT: also there's a reason the dial is called "effort", not "smarts".

Re: Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1

#130
post #99

I’m really excited to try this out. Fable and Opus 5 constantly wow me when working together. Unfortunately, I’m a little burned because of technical issues. Anthropic accidentally over-billed my account, and when I reached out to the support bot, it downgraded my account to a Free account. It’s been impossible to get it resolved and I have almost $200 held hostage. I don’t want to do a charge back. I’m one of the ma…

had a similar issue. just do a chargeback.
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