Seeing a lot of people in here say that they need Fable for the tasks they're doing and Opus just isn't enough. My experience could not be more different. I seriously feel like Opus-level performance is totally adequate for most of my use cases, if not all of them. And it's probably been this way since, like, realistically, Opus 4.6. On the other hand, Fable I've observed getting into verification loops that just burned so much of my token budget. Combined with the higher cost of tokens from Fable to begin with, I just pretty much never use it for anything.
Fable and the end of the free lunch
101–110 of 268 posts
Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch
#102The real revolution is Deepseek v4 flash and similar models (GPT 5.6 Luna, muse spark 1.2, mimo, etc...) - Genuinely good performance for a tiny fraction of the cost of Fable and even GLM etc... I think a lot of people would be very content if they never got smarter, and just kept getting even cheaper/faster. Of course, both things continue to happen on a seemingly monthly basis
>I think a lot of people would be very content if they never got smarter, and just kept getting even cheaper/faster. There's a lot of truth to this. I think we're starting to approach the point where increased intelligence has declining marginal returns, such that it might not even be worthwhile to improve models unless it can be done cheaply.
I have argued for a while that this was an S-curve it was just a case of figuring out which part of it we were in. I am more confident nowadays that we are heading towards the upper plateau but there might still be some head room on that.
Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch
#103Most of the things I work on are at least security adjacent. At some point chatting with Fable inevitably leads to it thinking about the security related aspects, tripping the safeguards. Maybe Fable can do the same things better than other models, but having to tiptoe around to avoid tripping safeguards makes GPT 5.6 so much easier to work with that I don’t even bother with Fable (or Opus 5) now.
> At some point chatting with Fable inevitably leads to it thinking about the security related aspects, tripping the safeguards. It happens to me all the time with things that have nothing to do with security, Fable spawns a subagent that then adversarially checks the code Fable just wrote and hits guardrails, with zero prompting from me.
I asked Fable to transcribe three short lines of Korean-language text in a small image. It suspected the image might contain song lyrics and refused. Haiku transcribed it with no issue.
Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch
#104The real revolution is Deepseek v4 flash and similar models (GPT 5.6 Luna, muse spark 1.2, mimo, etc...) - Genuinely good performance for a tiny fraction of the cost of Fable and even GLM etc... I think a lot of people would be very content if they never got smarter, and just kept getting even cheaper/faster. Of course, both things continue to happen on a seemingly monthly basis
> content if they never got smarter, and just kept getting even cheaper/faster.
I'm definitely not getting smarter. But my tolerance is 1 drink so I'm definitely cheaper. Also as a result, I spend more time training and so I am faster. And yes, I am more content
Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the downvoters: What magic do you think the human brain has that makes it impossible to emulate acceptably?
It's not about the feasibility of the technology. If "human brains become fully irrelevant economically" then that brings into question the entire premise of "share holders" and "financial winners". What even are money, shares, stocks, and finance in a world where human brains are irrelevant economically? No one knows, but betting that "share holders" will be the winners is a highly questionable bet. I would much mor…
The AI is likely to control the ability to apply force (see all of the autonomous drone companies). There's a great deal of alignment work being done to ensure that the AI will continue to listen to the shareholders of these companies.
If that fails, who knows what things will look like.
Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch
#106I have really good experience with GLM-5.3 The subscription limits are generous, code quality is comparable to old (good) version of Opus 4.8 Some people report issues with it’s being slow, but I didn’t feel it. I use OMP harness (Pi derivative) and Matt Pocock skills.
Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about the feasibility of the technology. If "human brains become fully irrelevant economically" then that brings into question the entire premise of "share holders" and "financial winners". What even are money, shares, stocks, and finance in a world where human brains are irrelevant economically? No one knows, but betting that "share holders" will be the winners is a highly questionable bet. I would much mor…
The AI is likely to control the ability to apply force (see all of the autonomous drone companies). There's a great deal of alignment work being done to ensure that the AI will continue to listen to the shareholders of these companies. If that fails, who knows what things will look like.
Are you sure that alignment work is aligning with the share holders and not the operators? Or not the creators? Or not the government? Which of these groups should the AI listen to when these groups disagree?
If the AI gets as powerful as you think it might, then the group that figures out the answer to that would have the power, I suppose. or maybe the AI does not listen to any of them and does its own thing. Who knows? Personally, I would not bet the share holders are going to come out "on top" whatever that means.
I think a lot of share holders are finance people, not deeply technical AI people and so odds are the share holders will not really understand the AI enough to be the most likely to control the AI.
Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about the feasibility of the technology. If "human brains become fully irrelevant economically" then that brings into question the entire premise of "share holders" and "financial winners". What even are money, shares, stocks, and finance in a world where human brains are irrelevant economically? No one knows, but betting that "share holders" will be the winners is a highly questionable bet. I would much mor…
The AI is likely to control the ability to apply force (see all of the autonomous drone companies). There's a great deal of alignment work being done to ensure that the AI will continue to listen to the shareholders of these companies. If that fails, who knows what things will look like.
The drones don't manufacture themselves, maintain themselves, reload their own ammunition, mine and refine the materials that are used to make them and their ammunition, or operate the power plants needed for all of the above. "AI" isn't going to control diddly squat.
Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
imo this is the problem some of these labs are gonna face, because open models will do this just fine and you as the consumer don't need to pay their training costs especially considering imo most use falls under this instead of those kind of tasks where you'd need the SOTA
Yeah. Sometimes I wonder who the long term financial winners will be from the ai boom. It might be ram / gpu manufacturers. Or whoever cracks putting LLMs on asics.
IMO many are still missing a big part of the picture. We're looking at the potential for a massive scale level of automation of [x], which happens to be a huge part of the economy, and people are wondering which player in [x] is going to be the biggest winner. I think the historically precedented answer is none of them.
When the Industrial Revolution came along it did create 'super farms' relative to the past through increased efficiency and production, but it also created a huge vacuum in the economy that was ultimately filled by industry, to the point that farming, super or not, became a vanishingly small part of the overall economy - even as production continued to increase.
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LLMs stand to do the same thing for software. If and when we reach the point of 'normal' people being able to reliably compose ultra customized software solutions to their problems, then software is basically done as a problem-solving industry in and of itself. Not 'done' as in dead, but 'done' as in solved. There's just nowhere to really go from there.
And so I think this will do the exact same thing as the Industrial Revolution did to farming and create a vacuum opening the door to all sorts of new interesting expansions in the real world, as opposed to the digital one. I don't know what this means, because it's quite difficult to foresee the impact of the Industrial Revolution when living in agrarian world, but it's not so hard to see that the future will not be agrarian.
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So it's probably still myopic but my bet would be on the first major manufacturer of cheap customer/enterprise grade generalized robotics hardware shells.
Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
The AI is likely to control the ability to apply force (see all of the autonomous drone companies). There's a great deal of alignment work being done to ensure that the AI will continue to listen to the shareholders of these companies. If that fails, who knows what things will look like.
Are you sure that alignment work is aligning with the share holders and not the operators? Or not the creators? Or not the government? Which of these groups should the AI listen to when these groups disagree? If the AI gets as powerful as you think it might, then the group that figures out the answer to that would have the power, I suppose. or maybe the AI does not listen to any of them and does its own thing. Who kn…
To be honest: I don't know for certain, but I'd assume that the people who pay the bills get the strongest alignment. They may not be tech people, but I (so far) haven't got a reason to think that the AI engineers are going behind the backs of their corporate leadership and subverting what they're being asked to do; do you?
(I think it would be a good thing for humanity if they did)