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Comment by sothatsit

3 months ago

This matches my experience of Opus 5 being a nice improvement over Opus 4.8, but not being revolutionary like Fable felt.

I’ve now replaced my use of Opus 4.8 xhigh with Opus 5 medium, and I’m using less tokens and it’s quicker. I can understand people being annoyed by its writing style but for getting work done that really doesn’t bother me. I’ve been really enjoying using it.

28 comments

sothatsit

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rubicon33  3 months ago

I think they neutered Fable. When it first came out it was indeed revolutionary. But what we have today, is not what we had before the ban.

  • swader999  3 months ago

    Noticed that too. I wonder if these things just degrade over time, perhaps with the way it writes memories about my project as it goes

    • Espressosaurus  3 months ago

      I’ve observed the degradation, but I suspect what’s happening is they’re tuning it for lower inference costs. Maybe turning down the amount of thinking, maybe quantizing, maybe something else.

      It seems like there’s a week by week and sometimes day by day change in performance when on a subscription plan using their harnesses.

      4 replies →

    • Gareth321  3 months ago

      I feel like a conspiracy theorist but it feels like every new model release from both Anthropic and OpenAI has 1-2 weeks of fantastic performance then a gradual (and sometimes not so gradual) decline in intelligence. It's like they're quantising the model in the background to optimise for available compute/RAM. Which, if I put my MBA hat on, would make perfect sense. Why not halve the required RAM for "90%" of the performance? They get fantastic benchmarks and glowing reviews on release, then slowly squeeze more performance out of the model. By the time the next model is ready for release, the jump feels quite large again.

      7 replies →

  • jbird99  3 months ago

    At this point I don't even bother with it. Constantly falls back to Opus anyway, so I may as well save myself some time.

Balinares  3 months ago

Can you elaborate on what felt revolutionary to you about Fable?

  • sothatsit  3 months ago

    I got Fable to run overnight and I woke up to a working prototype of a very complex feature. And then I did it again for another complex feature the next night.

    The code still took weeks to clean up, but it worked and was correct. It felt then, and still feels, like a big step change on very hard problems. These are problems I would previously expect to take a month or longer to implement.

    I have also noticed Fable can handle much more nuance when reasoning through writing and research, but that is harder to quantify.

  • dahdum  3 months ago

    Not OP, but to me it initially felt extremely proactive and energetic, just powering through roadblocks with ingenuity and enthusiasm. After it came back I was constantly getting refusals and downgrades for things Opus had been doing. I’ve written it off for my use cases and getting by just fine with Opus 4.8 and now 5.

fastball  3 months ago

Medium vs High? Why? From all the charts I've seen the performance jump is pretty large from med -> high (not as noticeable from high -> xhigh).