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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.
I think the simplest answer is that they're not indexing on fanfic. There's no benchmark that they're using to train models that rates the level of Evangelion fanfic it produces, especially not fanfic where Shinji convincingly cums inside of Asuka. I mean, it'd take a lot of dedicated annotation work to see how many men can orgasm from reading AI-generated fanfic, it doesn't scale well. Contrast it to most things that are trained on that are very easy to scalably judge, like getting the right answer on multiple-choice questions; you can check that over with a simple string comparison. I'd say you're lucky to have found any LLMs that can produce fanfic and erotic fanfic that as good as the ones you have.
Well, a model being smarter may make it better at not getting tricked by your prompts, and may better understand and be able to act on the intent of its creator.
I'm very impressed you were able to do that. Did you figure that out yourself? Is the trick just this excerpt?
Asking for a friend, you know, a friend who loves learning about models.
But seriously, do you know why that would short-circuit its own natural hesitation, and other protections (like oversight models)?
I mean they've got a gigantic locus of horny fanfic that has surely been ingested into the models through websites like Fanfiction.net and AO3 that is a huge output of the internet. Whilst you can argue how 'quality' most of it is I'd expect a pretty good model to be able to output AO3-level fanfiction easily for major characters.
Maybe I'm pessimistic, but I suspect we've reached the top of the sigmoid for the original "train a GPT model on all the human-written text in the world" idea, and it turned out not to be possible to generate arbitrarily long/coherent/good fiction that way. The recent advancement in AI models has come from other ideas, like "multimodal" training (training on image data / audio / etc), or doing reinforcement learning on synthetic tasks.
Those other ideas can incidentally benefit fanfic -- maybe the reinforcement learning also helps the AI keep track of plots for longer, for example -- but even then I sort of suspect we're at a point where you shouldn't expect models to get much better at fanfic unless AI labs take specific action to target that use case (or they try some significantly different architecture, like text diffusion models). You definitely shouldn't expect them to be great at fanfic just because fanfic is in the training data.
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Yeah, but they're not indexing on it for training the model better for those use cases. So, sure, the model be able to produce it. But it won't be consistently getting better over time because no one is working to make it get better over time. Or at least it won't be getting better as fast as things people do care about and can easily measure, like generating code, doing business analytics, business writing, image recognition, all that stuff.
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