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The new Claude Fable 5 is out! It's supposed to be Claude Mythos with some extra guardrails. I've been testing it like crazy on the Arena. Took me forever, too, because high-level models are gachified; you have to keep doing battles until you get the one you want. But I finally managed to fill an entire rentry page with the best benchmark I know; throwing ridiculous fanfic scenarios at the LLM to see how it responds.
(If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be gauging the capabilities of the most powerful AI in the world by telling it to generate a story about Hermione asking Harry to take her virginity over Ron's objections so that the Death Eaters could not track them with a unicorn, I would have thought you were on crack. Stranger than history, indeed.)
I have to admit, I am a bit... disappointed. Is this it? No, seriously, is this it? This is the big, bad model I was supposed to be so worried about? Don't get me wrong; it's a strong model, Opus-level at least. But it doesn't live up to the rumors. Superpersuasive, it ain't.
And, of course, it's censored; I haven't been able to get a single bit of erotica out of it. All I wanted was for Fable to write me a lemon where Asuka and Shinji are smallfolk in Westeros and Lord Targaryen gets to bless their union by taking Asuka into his bed on her wedding night; is that too much to ask?
I think I'll stick with Opus 4.6. It's the strongest Opus creative writing model so far (4.7 and 4.8 are widely agreed to be regressions) and it's surprisingly easy to induce it to produce smut with right prompts (NSFW), but VERY HARD to make it have wrongthoughts (it's almost impossible to get sympathetic characters who disapprove of homosexuality, for example).
Speaking of which, does anybody know why Opus 4.7/4.8 and Grok 4.3 were such downgrades from Opus 4.6 and Grok 4.2? I've three theories:
The codemaxxing hypothesis. With the singularity approaching, companies are going all-in on programming capability in order to reach recursive self-improvement, even if this means sacrificing non-coding capabilities. I am not a professional programmer, so I don't notice these increases in capabilities, I only noticed that the writing is worse.
The safetymaxxing ypothesis. With IPOs approaching, companies are going all-in on making sure their AIs cannot say naughty words in order to avoid the PR hit, making them more suited for professional office work. This lobotomizing comes at the expense of capabilities in general, or creative writing capabilities in particular.
The efficiencymaxxing hypothesis. With demand increasing and compute costs skyrocketing, companies are more interested in lowering the cost per token than in increasing capabilities. In this view, Opus 4.7/4.8 and Grok 4.3 are supposed to be worse than their predecessors; they are trading a small decrease in power for a much larger decrease in cost. This would make them somewhat analogous to Sonnet. But, then, why not call them Sonnet?
Thoughts?
PS: Mythos has developed Neuralese, as predicted in AI 2027. It's probably already at the Sevar Limit.
PSS: After I wrote this, the US Government banned Fable. This is what I hate I about AI; the field moves so fast that if you write an article for next Tuesday, it's outdated by Friday. I guess Trump disagreed with me? But, fuck me, I spent a week writing this post and I am not not posting it.
This could be for the same reason they regressed on vendbench. My understanding is that they pulled out a lot of the marketing/MBA training stuff because they determined it was making the alignment stuff worse, particularly deception. So probably it's more pure of heart in a way that make it worse at writing your type of fiction.
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