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Comment by zuInnp

7 hours ago

So it Opus performs as well as Fable what is then the selling point of Fable?

All of this starts to feel more like a drug dealer selling their newest stuff.

In two weeks we probaly get Fable 5.2 with “groundbreaking” improvements, then Astra x+1 etc and then the cycle starts again.

And on the way I always have to check my tooling and need to adjust things to get max results.

All of this starts to feel more like a drug dealer selling their newest stuff.

Yeah, like Apple tells me the M6 is the best chip, but just a few months ago that's what they said about the M5. What a bunch of frauds.

? they will obviously release Fable 5.5 soon(tm). It's same as hardware. The previously top tier product gets obsolete

  • New generation's "upper-mid tier" offering claims to be almost 1:1 match for the previous gen's "top tier" - in other news, fork found in kitchen.

    Now, Anthropic might stall on releasing Fable 5.5, due to the "pacing the frontier" threat-to-humankind management business. If so, Fable 5.1 would remain a niche model for the next bit.

Don't forget that Opus 5 was tracking fable on many benchmarks, yet it was borderline unusable for any coding work. My Claude sub usage has been 100% fable, 0% opus 5.

Benchmarks often don't survive contact with reality.

  • That's not my experience at all. Opus is an extremely capable coder on high or xhigh effort. It can read academic papers, implement algorithms from the description in the paper alone and reproduce results without breaking a sweat. This is remarkable because it is pure reasoning on unseen material; in some cases the paper was just published and there wasn't an implementation to learn from in the training data.

    • My experience is that Opus can definitely write decent code, but it incurs tech debt and adds unneeded complexity.

    • did you actually verify that it's output in those scenarios is good ? in my experience opus has been a disappointment and constantly trailing behind actually solving hard problems versus the OpenAI models. I'll say that both have terrible writing style though.

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  • Opus is fine at coding (for correctness), but horrible at talking about code. I don't really see the defect rate going down when using Astra or Fable 5.1, but they are just more coherent in both how they explaing code/architecture/choices, and how they actually code the thing. With Opus, I'm using smaller models to delete the vast majority of comments and 'clean up' correct code that is too weird.

    Thing is, I'm still reading the majority of generated code, and I have colleagues who'll laugh at me if my PRs are a shit show. I fear what vibe coders are pushing to the servers of myriads of start ups, and pity the poor people who'll have to clean it up in a year or two.

  • Mines pretty much inverted - my colleagues and I noticed almost zero difference between the quality of code in Opus vs Fable. Occasionally I'll switch to Fable for an arduous debugging task but that's about it.

typically, when any AI company says a model performs as well as fable, all they're really telling us is that the benchmarks that exist for measuring AI capabilities aren't very good.

Big model smell is a real thing. For certain classes of problem, ones you get a feel for but can't easily articulate, a big last-gen model can get you what you're looking for when no quantity of tokens from some ultra-RLed mid-size latest generation model can.