Live data from Hacker News

Fable and the end of the free lunch

dbreunig.com

151–160 of 268 posts

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#151
post #149
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won financially. Encyclopedia sets were expensive.

Your savings are real, but they don't show up in GDP or a profit-and-loss statement of any company.

The cost of buying the encyclopedia becomes disposable income to be used on other consumer goods. In that sense in shows up in lots of other companies profit-and-loss statements.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#152

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 bur…

I agree. I've been perfectly happy since Opus 4.6. I remember thinking at the time if it never improved I would have been fine there.

The vast majority of people, eg vibecoders, do not need Fable or Sol tier intelligence for their slop To Do app.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#153

A few months ago folks were understandably annoyed when Microsoft dropped their heavily subsidized per-request pricing model because it was figuratively burning cash. Well, I'm here to tell you that whatever is going on behind the scenes at Cursor with this Space-X acquisition in the works, the Auto setting is clearly routing all prompts through "Cursor Grok 4.6 High" right now. This is a degree of subsidy that makes…

Going to be great to see the cash burn on SpaceX's next earnings report. Will the cult keep the stock price pumped?

Grok 4.6 XHigh uses 2.52x fewer tokens per task than Fable Max. It's much more efficient. It also has low market penetration, which is why SpaceX is selling so much of their compute to Anthropic et al. From a business perspective, they're capitalising on the market very well. If Grok becomes more popular we should expect to pay more.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#154
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using ChatGPT voice during cooking to reflect on variations of a dishes i was preparing for years. It was so amazing to get advices and reflect that it struck me : I could use this model forever - it’s clever enough to help me tons and do lot of work for me - even if ai would stop evolving I would love it

I share this feeling too. The latest models, even if not necessarily frontier, say Opus 5, Sol high and the likes, I could keep using these models forever even if they did not significantly improve beyond this point. I also believe we'll come up with new ways of using these very same models beyond the mainstream chat and agent interfaces, as the bottleneck is imho in harnesses/environments and not so much model intel…

Do you have to give any special instructions to do this? I always want to do something like this, but any time I try I get so sick of listening to what it has to say, just long winded explanations of stuff that tends to go off the rails. Imo it's hard enough to read ai output when I can go back and forward between sentences to make sense of what's being said let alone listen to a continuous train of slop.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 winn.. Sorry to cut you off, but have you looked at Nvidia's numbers since the NFT craze? They won. Sell shovels in a gold rush, make better shovels, repeat on the next rush.

Nvidia has been winning for decades, they got it right in gaming, they got it right in crypto, and they got it right in AI. People (outside of tech mostly) think they just got lucky but if that's the case, they have all the luck in the world.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#156
post #89
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you making a serious argument that superhuman intelligence is a plausible outcome of training LLMs on everything humanity knows so far? Or are you making the generic assertion that AGI is theoretically possible via means other than emulating the human brain? Because the latter is a strawman (nobody has asserted anything to the contrary), and I have seen no evidence at all to support the former.

I think we can compare the human brain and LLMs on a bunch of capabilities today, and see how we compare. By my reckoning: - LLMs have better long term memory (they know more than any human) and more working memory (LLMs have fast, uniform access to their whole context window). - LLMs are faster than we are. - Humans have online learning (we can do simultaneous learning and inference), giving us advantages in many no…

Because LLMs don't understand anything. That's the tech. They can only predict what they have been trained with and fail daily at the most basic tasks. Granted they can do amazing things, no question there. But they are not "smart".

For example, it seems that even at Fable scale, simple concepts like the passage of time or (gasp) timezones elude them. I live in UTC+10 and with any RFC8339 data LLMs are constantly confused - is it Sunday the 10th or Sunday the 9th, etc. I have tried many solutions for this and every time it finds a way to get it wrong.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to be the shareholders of the first companies to crack AGI, and make human brains fully irrelevant economically. With the trillions of dollars that's going in through both investment and users, it's going to happen. I don't believe the human brain has fundamental magic that will make this impossible.

The true followers (shareholders) of the AI messiah will be saved, everyone else is doomed.

late stage christianity

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#158

I 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.

glm 5.3 gets awfully slow during peak hours. But you might not hit them to frequently.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#159
post #10

I just use Fable for reviews of specs and code then hand off to Opus to work on. Works well.

Does it not silently degrade to Opus if it does not like some word?

Users have the option of silent/automatic degradation or a complete halt. I have it set to stop rather than degrade because I want to know when I've hit the safeguard.

From the claude settings:

> Switch models when a message is flagged

> When safeguards flag a message, automatically switch to a different model to keep chatting. When off, your session will pause instead. Applies to web and remote sessions.

FWIW I get a ton of usage out of fable and it's only happened to me once.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#160
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your savings are real, but they don't show up in GDP or a profit-and-loss statement of any company.

The cost of buying the encyclopedia becomes disposable income to be used on other consumer goods. In that sense in shows up in lots of other companies profit-and-loss statements.

Maybe, but that's very diffuse and hard to attribute to Wikipedia.

And it would show up in real GDP, not necessarily in nominal GDP.

Post reply on HN