Comment by comboy
8 days ago
'by the way, your previous attempts have these structural problems."
Just to be clear, it did not have access to any previous work that opus did? Because they are pretty good at digging out relevant tmp files and making use of whatever is out there.
With my fable adventures I caught it hallucinating something and stating it as a fact in CLI twice. And it was something that I did not see opus do in such way, opus obviously many times stated some things that it did not verify but guessed, but fable said something like "the probe showed that ..." - but there was no probe, it was not about some past events it was about what it was doing right now. "I overstated"...
But boy does it know Chinese, so much better than any other english model, gemini used to be the king but fable clearly was trained on a decent amount of it. It has a deep cultural understanding.
If you have some spare time, I'd be interested in knowing what kind of questions you use to test models on understanding of Chinese culture.
I'm creating hanzirama.com
I generate explanations for characters and words like so: https://hanzirama.com/character/%E6%9D%A5#explain
But I don't want to mislead learners and want to provide some cultural depth, so I have a hole sophisticated pipeline, using multiple models to generate the explanation, then multiple models look for issues in the explanation, each issue goes through the panel of judges (basically trying to squash down any hallucinations), it's fixed and it goes through such cycles a few times over.
I've been at it for some months now, so I have dozens of different probes, that I needed to evaluate prompts and method changes. Plus on some items I generated so many explanations through different means that I can tell a lot about given model just by looking at one.
Plus I'm doing some statistics, so I see how e.g. when working as judges of issues some models correlate heavily with some others... Fun fact during some testing runs basically just testing providers I stumbled upon qwen introducing himself as made by Google. And also Anhropic's Sonnet saying that it was made by OpenAI :)
At this point all my evaluations frameworks and pipelines stuff is much bigger than the site itself. I'm having lots of fun though.
Yes, iit had access. Thats actually the point.
I maintain a failure registry in the repo. Every failed attempt gets documented with the exact mechanism, the test that regressed, the revert SHA, and an instruction to start from that frontier. Fable read all of it.
But so did Opus.
Each of the 16 Opus failures ran in the same harness with the same accumulating registry. By attempt 15, it had disproofs 1–14 in context. By the end, Opus had basically the same corpus that Fable started with, and it still kept failing, sometimes by re-deriving an already-disproved approach in a slightly different shape.
So “it leveraged the previous work” doesn’t really separate them. Both had the leverage. Only one converted it.
What changed wasn’t more context. It was that Fable rejected a premise inside the context.
The registry’s standing framing was: “this needs whole-program borrow inference, which conflicts with per-module incrementality” (architecturally blocked.) Fable ran around 5 fresh attempts in-session, hit the same wall, and then noticed the framing was a red herring: the borrow analysis already runs module-wide, and for a single-module program, the module is the whole program.
Opus read that same framing for months and treated it as a constraint. Fable falsified it.
its the same repo, same rules, same disproof history, same workflow. The model was the only variable that changed, and the outcome flipped. Is it possible that attempt 17 by Opus could have figured it out? sure. but there's 16 previous attempts that say otherwise.
As fars as anecdotes go, that’s about as controlled as it gets.
I’ve had a similar experience.
Pointing out past suboptimal / failing behaviours to new opus sessions would almost always actually create a sort of "anchoring bias" that would drive the agents towards exhibiting the failure mode (often while mentioning how it wouldn’t fall for it).
As far as I can recall, Fable has been the first model to discover the documented failure modes, comment on them, and just… keep going, actually avoiding them. Quite a surprise.