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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 do program, and 4.8 is definitely a better programmer than 4.6, but yes non-programming capabilities in general seem to have degrated. Apropos of the same, GLM-5.2 (open weights!) just released and it's literally 2nd on the arena.ai coding leaderboard, above Opus 4.8 even, but is nowhere to be seen on the creative writing or document benchmarks. Companies are correctly focusing on making the best coding models because it's commerically useful in a way that being able to spit out Harry/Snape fanfics at speed isn't.
Writing is too subjective and has in any case been better than the average native English speaker since GPT-3, probably 2. It is not going to write Ulysses (yet), but there isn’t much at that quality in the training set and almost nobody would appreciate it if it could. 99.9% of writing in the English language is covered by models that have been available for years. It may be generic, but compared to the writing ability of the average member of the public it’s good enough to write a restaurant menu, an email to a colleague, a press release, a Facebook marketplace ad, a high school essay. We may lament the sad end of the amusing broken English of earlier years, but few will miss it.
Ulysses is almost the worst possible comparison to use here, as I suspect the mental process that produced it is not dissimilar to an LLM with its temperature set too high. Sure, some people claim it's a masterwork of literature, but whether this reflects some true ineffable artistic vision or not, I doubt I could tell the difference between one of its pages and some random junk spit out by an LLM that's past its context window.
More relevant to me is that LLMs are not going to produce the next Dungeon Crawler Carl anytime soon. And that's a shame!
There are a few different things going on with Ulysses that contribute to why it's achieved such an exalted status.
On a "macro", conceptual level: you can think of it as an illustration of Clement Greenberg's thesis of the "flatness of the canvas", just applied to literature rather than painting. One of the dominant philosophical themes in early 20th century art was the "self-consciousness" of the art object: the work of art taking its own formal construction as its subject matter and embracing its nature as an object of artifice, rather than presenting itself as a transparent representation of an external subject matter (in the way that e.g. classical representational painting aims to be a transparent window to a scene depicting physical objects in 3D space). Abstract painting forced the viewer to consciously acknowledge the fact that they were looking at paint on a flat canvas. Ulysses does something similar with words, it embraces the "textuality of the text": treating words as a pliable and fluid medium that don't necessarily have to be constrained by the traditional logic of representation. It plays with this concept in a bunch of different ways without just falling apart into a string of random words. But it also pushed stream-of-consciousness writing to its limits and foregrounded the internal psychological states of its characters in a way that no novel had ever really done before. And it's also replete with explicit and not-so-explicit references to the Western literary canon, like a puzzle to be decoded. Basically it's operating on all these different levels at once and still managing to weave it all into a coherent whole.
On a "micro", technical level: it's kind of just obviously a work of intense and surpassing beauty, Joyce was unmatched as a prose stylist:
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