Comment by junebash
6 hours ago
This honestly just reads as “this model failed exactly where the company said it would but I’m very special and deserve special treatment rather than the same overactive guardrails I and everyone else were told we would get.”
I just think that Anthropic's usage of the word "classifier", which implies a minimum level of intelligence, was very misleading. Fact is, you cannot use Fable for anything remotely connected to even elementary school biology or medical topics. There is no attempt whatsoever to distinguish between legitimate and dangerous tasks, except an extremely broad and non-specific rejection of anything related to security or biology.
When did Anthropic say you couldn't use it for math?
If you feed their "pure math" question to Fable, in its reasoning it rightly determines that it is the sort of thing you find in phylogenetics / algebraic-combinatorics complexity papers. That is what triggers the classifier.
Anthropic is 100% to blame for fear-mongering, but they said it would be blocked from any biology questions -- even high school level -- and they meant it. If the classifier sees anything related to biology, even in its own reasoning about the question, it blocks it.
Saying it's therefore not useful generally is of course ridiculous. Is it annoying? Of course it is.
The abstract problem absolutely has legitimate interpretations outside of phylogenetics, and there are other ways to formulate the problem that directly relate to linear algebra over GF(2). Reformulating the problem in those contexts also failed. It is a legitimate, pure CS theory question, that itself relates quite closely so several other known results including in computational geometry
https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.02801
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comgeo.2024.102102
https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10339
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1998196.1998218 — DOI: 10.1145/1998196.1998218
The problem in the post is right at the edge of variants that are known to be in P and variants that have been proven NP-complete. So, in this case, it is simply Fable refusing to engage with a theory question.
Also, as I note in the post:
This may not be true for everyone, but for anyone working in Bioinformatics, Genomics, Computational Biology, Biology, Cybersecurity, and, seemingly Computer Science, this seems to be the case.
Of course it can go on a tear for various coding challenges. However, the more that I learn the more that I also suspect that it rejects not just prompts that may relate tenuously to biology or cybersecurity, but also otherwise completely innocuous prompts that are issued by people who work in areas adjacent to biology and cybersecurity. If true, I think that is certainly a bridge too far, and a hard policy to defend.