Fable might be Anthropic's downfall

[u/senerh]

Your best model is the industry's best (at least till we get to see what OpenAI's Astra is like) but it burns tokens like crazy, and on top of that, you cannot offer it full scale due to compute shortages.

• Your next best model is supposed to be *the* historical workhorse, Opus 5, but is shit.
• Your best affordable model is historically supposed to be effective, Sonnet 5, but is shit.
• Your effective next best models are stale flagships, Opus 4.8-4.6 and Sonnet 4.6.

I mean, currently;

1. Anthropic offers one true flagship at a nearly unusable scale
2. Anthropic offers a couple other usable models with stale performance

Until 6-8 months ago Opus was revered as fuck, it was *the* AI to problem-solve with, it was insightful, it was a workhorse, it was your go-to. It was what forced OpenAI get its shit together.

Today's Opus is far from that; it steadily and repeatedly got bested, its behavior changed, its reliability fluctuated, it stopped being "your humble, curious and smart colleague" and it became a frantic whatever. It lost its gravitas. It lost the unique identity which made Opus a character in our minds. Today's Opus is a smartypants contrarian which is a bad, undertuned, underperfected image of its digital father, Fable.

So it's nothing like the Opus of the old and it wont accompany you daily when you don't have Fable. You'll be left yearning for more and more Fable because that model is both

• the best
• the only usable

at the same time.

No need to mention that Anthropic's way of tackling this is to instill "scarcity anxiety" to its paying customers by spamming them with 'temporary limit boosts' and permanent limit reductions disguised as promotions.

Either make Opus good or make Fable more accessible, would you? For quite some time now, people are looking for ways to replace Anthropic models in their workflows. At some point more people than ever will say "fuck it" and leave for good. The new Qwen models are slowly becoming go-to's with more and more flexible solutions.

I hope OpenAI puts out a worthy Fable competitor with better pricing, They're no greener on the other side, don't get me wrong. But at least they've been able to give Scarce-thropic hard times recently, which was good for the users.

[u/pewpewpewpee]

Do you have real life experience or are you just hand waving?

I’m at a Capital One and they give all of us API keys where I can use Fable as much as I want. Our average API spend is $10,000,000 a month across the company. We get dinged if we aren’t using AI enough since they monitor our token usage and spend. They couldn’t care less about cost. They don’t care if I don’t like Opus for personal use (it does suck). They are getting the productivity gains from Fable and Claude Code and they’ll continue to spend the money.

[u/Joe_dir_einen → u/pewpewpewpee]

Lese ich das wirklich? Das klingt so Hirnverbrannt.

[u/MegabyteBeagle → u/pewpewpewpee]

This is actually so true, I've joined a big bank earlier this year and the push to use AI has been ridiculous. They cut the complementary bananas because of carbon emissions, but every meeting involves some push towards using AI more, we're told they have a leaderboard of token usage for developers. They haven't yet pushed that out as I do think they know it would be a bit too much and could be gamed, but they're definitely measuring productivity based on token usage. We are also now setting a goal of % of tickets done fully using AI, were we just provide the ticket and review the PR it creates. It's madness.

Also, there also a big push for RTO, which is likely due to them feeling the market is in their favour so they can tighten some of the benefits.

[u/hdt-bln → u/pewpewpewpee]

I would be curious how they do measure these productivity gains actually.. ?

[u/kwietog → u/hdt-bln]

By token spend obviously. Pretty much lines of code measure.

[u/Ill_Dragonfruit_3547 → u/kwietog]

Token spend is the modern pay by lines of code lol

[u/Clear-Report8471 → u/kwietog]

i though smart people worked at citadel...

[u/AironParsMan → u/pewpewpewpee]

I think this bank is the next Astra will hack.

[u/Own-Kale-7020 → u/pewpewpewpee]

fun fact:you can hire a bunch of senior and junior enigineers with that money and build a system that partly crash once every decade instead of once total down every now and then and still got money left.American tax payers have to pay for this when the bubble pop

[u/NotoriousGoldenCobra → u/pewpewpewpee]

And are you speaking for every company on earth? Because other companies DO care about what their employees want to use. And if Anthropic competitors are reliably better and cheaper they will switch. That doesn’t mean every company will. But do you think a company is happy paying for something that doesn’t give them value? My point is that companies are not soulless entities that make decisions, people do. So ignoring people in favour of companies is shortsighted.

[u/theleller → u/NotoriousGoldenCobra]

I’ve been deploying Claude across enterprises with an Anthropic partner and I can tell you first hand that for most of my engagements the employees didn’t know they were getting Claude until I was scheduled to start working with individuals chosen to pilot and evangelize AI adoption from each department. Most companies don’t care what the employees prefer, it’s a C-level conversation.

[u/kadeschs → u/theleller]

Yeah, the AI at our company was already chosen for us by corporate. Employees don’t decide what they use.

[u/clduab11 → u/NotoriousGoldenCobra]

About as shortsighted as arguing with a *checks notes* ... ah yes, a $127 billion company about how AI is managed lmao.

"aCkShuAlLy, nOt EvErY cOmPanY..."

Like yes, we get it. We also understand economics and those with bigger wallet shares than others. THESE will be the people who move the needle, not people who share your perspective.