Comment by meowface
5 hours ago
To summarize: the classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are way, way too zealous and have way too many false positives.
From my experience, the model itself is very useful when it isn't refusing any of your prompts.
It is, but it's also using tokens at absurd rate, I asked it to review the planned architecture for a medium scale project and it used my 5 hours limit on one prompt just zaaaaap, not even the fable limit straight up the full 5 hour session no more Claude for the afternoon thank you for paying you Max x20 sub. Hell it didn't even bother to finish produce anything worthwhile.
And just to be clear, plan was already done, just had to review it, it got opus 4.8 Max and gpt 5.5 Extra High validated already and they didn't use much resource for it so I just don't get it. I guess they want to use it as a way to feed the extra credit money income.
I'm using a homemade ai consensus thing for planning and I wanted to add fable to it but forget it.
Or maybe I should use fable in low effort reasoning mode and it will be better than opus 4.8 at max ?
Oh yeah, I've noticed the same, for sure. But that's basically what I was expecting. The best model is not necessarily always going to be the most cost-effective/sensible model for a particular use case.
Fable-class models will probably be cheaper for Anthropic to serve within the year, though. And rumors are GPT-6 is of similar size and intelligence to Fable and may come out within the next few months. OpenAI models tend to give you more bang for your buck, probably in part due to OpenAI being able to throw more capital and compute around on top of being particularly willing to loss-lead to stay competitive with Anthropic.
Thanks - that's a good phrase we can use to replace the baity title. I've done so above.
(Normally we prefer to find a representative phrase from the article itself, but I found that too daunting and gave up.)
How do you know? Is it really that obvious of a tell between Opus and Fable? My understanding is that they silently downgrade you.
No, there's a banner that says you've been downgraded.
Very considerate. But also, can we trust them that they're not downgrading without saying anything? The incentives are there, to bill at Mythos prices for Opus costs.