They've put themselves in a corner. Fable was too good and they gave it away with the $20 plan. It had to be a big step from Opus 4.8 to show progress, and Opus 4.8 is GREAT at coding in many different domains.
But they're getting killed on token cost. They have to get people paying more for tokens. So then they put Fable in the $200 plan and release Opus 5. I'm suspicious of Opus 5. It is mostly worse than 4.8. It _seems_ like they nerfed it to create more distance between it and Fable.
So what have most of us done? Stayed on Opus 4.8. The statistics bear this out. 4.8 still dominates.
Now they're stuck. If they take 4.8 away, everyone will riot. If they make Opus 5.x better than 4.8, they disincentivize everyone from moving to Fable and most importantly, paying more.
Really, all they can do is take the L for now and just let 4.8 be the apex of the $20 pro plan for the foreseeable future while they work like hell to make Fable THAT much better that it earns the $200 to $infinity that they really want everyone to pay.
Yeah I mean if I run out of tokens every couple of hours and have to pause my work or shell out more money I’ll switch to other tools that don’t have this problem. Though they turned this down a bit it seems, I can work with Fable reasonably now and I enjoy it actually. I think they were just testing out how much they can raise the cost without users leaving when having the best model. I guess not much after all!
Fable is just way too expensive and limited compared to GPT 5.6 Sol, and the only task that requires that level of intelligence is frontier scientific research. I use GPT/Codex primarily for coding and usually keep Claude on Sonnet 5 most of the time as I use Claude primarily to debug/brainstorm/make frontends as a supplement to GPT.
Yeah, it's pretty much apples to oranges, and I don't consider GPT and Claude to be interchangeable at all. From my anecdotal experience, GPTs generally codes more creatively and verbosely but Claudes tend to code more carefully and precisely, so the result is that GPTs generally finds more creative solutions to problems but also writes buggier code, which is why I converged on the setup of GPT/Codex for implementation and Claude for debugging, which feels more like a force multiplier than using each model individually.
Most of the benchmarks have exceeded their usefulness. Opus 5 beats fable 5 on many of them. Anyone who has used both models will notice immediately that this doesn't translate to the real world. Opus 5 is nothing short of a regression from Opus 4.8. Fable is genuinely a great model so long as you don't trigger a guard rail and it downgrades.
Sol in my experience isn't significantly different than fable ignoring that Sol burns usage 10x faster but the end result is hard to differentiate.
GLM 5.3 is a hair behind these two.
An anecdote but not an original one from the people I talk to.
I wish Fable were as good as you make it sound. A plan created by Fable is good, but in my case, it always contain issues caught only when it's reviewed again (whether by itself, Opus, Sol etc.). That's (almost) not different from plans created by Sol, GLM 5.3 etc. The one thing where it's genuinely better is the front-end, but then again it's far from perfect, it just needs less iterations.
I've always wondered why everyone flocks to SV's latest darling company. Have we not learned from our history of glorifying these SV darlings that turn hostile?
Most of the people pushing this are just hoping that they can cash out before the hype pops and financial gravity crashes the party. Sam Altman recently claiming that the singularity is here is so stupid on its face he should just be treated as what he is, a huckster.
None of this stuff ever made any sense on what it was being sold initially. It was always insulting that the media and business leaders tried to argue that the tech could replace entire call centers or vast swaths of entire industries.
People keep arguing, but it will or it has based on extrapolating certain, reasonable use cases. Klarna has shut up about replacing call centers with bots because Markov chains with memory only can do so much.
I am because Claude has figured out I am a biochemist and therefore even asking Fable what the weather is gets me bumped back to Opus, sometimes even Opus 4.8 instead of 5. Kimi? GLM 5.3? DeepSeek? No such problem.
I can literally open a new chat with just "Hello" and it gets bumped.
Just cancelled my Claude subscription and used Ox Alpha Free through OpenCode (so that's one).
In my view, from the testing I did since Thursday, it's better than Fable. I had just finished a rather large task that Fable completed, including a /review and an /ultrareview.
Ox Alpha found bugs that Fable and Opus missed, and it continued to build things like a pro.
It does have issues with availability - but it's on a free promo right now. That also means that I don't know how much it would have cost if I had to pay API prices for it, which might not be cheaper than the subsidized small company / consumer usage, but for large companies paying API prices for either offering, the difference will be considerable.
I almost feel like there's some sort of paid campaign going on in Hacker News promoting the Chinese/open models. I feel like every day I'm hearing about how the frontier labs are dead but your experience is the same as mine. My company pays for Claude AND Codex but we never really use the open models for anything critical.
Doesn’t matter if your company pays for Claude, Anthropic and OpenAI valuations and expenditures commitment requires them to win the vast majority of the market to make economical sense. And the Chinese competition makes that very unlikely, to say the least. They likely won’t disappear fully but their “free” lunch as the AI darlings is done, on paper. Will be interesting to see how they adapt
It's absolutely a campaign. Every time anyone says anything about Claude, immediately and inorganically there's a bunch of people claiming to be biochemists who are constantly shut down by their work, people saying that they run out of tokens instantly even on Premium, people saying they get even better results on their GTX 4050, and people saying that Grok is better, or OpenAI is better. It's probably several different campaigns each run by different tranches of the competition. Reminds me of the good old days in which every criticism of bitcoin was immediately jumped on by nine or ten pretend Venezuelans who asserted that it was the only thing permitting their family to evade government currency controls.
Reads like: brilliant Carnegie Mellon University computer science grad struggles to find job where he is not replaced by cheap, inferior Indian labor that still gets the job done, even if it takes marginally longer.
No shit we're all paying 清冲 Flash to do the grunt work. Turns out though, paying 清冲 Flash a few more cents does exactly what Ivy Wasp Pro Mythical does. Crazy how that works.
They've put themselves in a corner. Fable was too good and they gave it away with the $20 plan. It had to be a big step from Opus 4.8 to show progress, and Opus 4.8 is GREAT at coding in many different domains.
But they're getting killed on token cost. They have to get people paying more for tokens. So then they put Fable in the $200 plan and release Opus 5. I'm suspicious of Opus 5. It is mostly worse than 4.8. It _seems_ like they nerfed it to create more distance between it and Fable.
So what have most of us done? Stayed on Opus 4.8. The statistics bear this out. 4.8 still dominates.
Now they're stuck. If they take 4.8 away, everyone will riot. If they make Opus 5.x better than 4.8, they disincentivize everyone from moving to Fable and most importantly, paying more.
Really, all they can do is take the L for now and just let 4.8 be the apex of the $20 pro plan for the foreseeable future while they work like hell to make Fable THAT much better that it earns the $200 to $infinity that they really want everyone to pay.
Yeah I mean if I run out of tokens every couple of hours and have to pause my work or shell out more money I’ll switch to other tools that don’t have this problem. Though they turned this down a bit it seems, I can work with Fable reasonably now and I enjoy it actually. I think they were just testing out how much they can raise the cost without users leaving when having the best model. I guess not much after all!
Fable is just way too expensive and limited compared to GPT 5.6 Sol, and the only task that requires that level of intelligence is frontier scientific research. I use GPT/Codex primarily for coding and usually keep Claude on Sonnet 5 most of the time as I use Claude primarily to debug/brainstorm/make frontends as a supplement to GPT.
I thought Sol was on par with Opus, so comparing it to Fable is apples and (very expensive) oranges?
Yeah, it's pretty much apples to oranges, and I don't consider GPT and Claude to be interchangeable at all. From my anecdotal experience, GPTs generally codes more creatively and verbosely but Claudes tend to code more carefully and precisely, so the result is that GPTs generally finds more creative solutions to problems but also writes buggier code, which is why I converged on the setup of GPT/Codex for implementation and Claude for debugging, which feels more like a force multiplier than using each model individually.
I've used all three extensively.
Most of the benchmarks have exceeded their usefulness. Opus 5 beats fable 5 on many of them. Anyone who has used both models will notice immediately that this doesn't translate to the real world. Opus 5 is nothing short of a regression from Opus 4.8. Fable is genuinely a great model so long as you don't trigger a guard rail and it downgrades.
Sol in my experience isn't significantly different than fable ignoring that Sol burns usage 10x faster but the end result is hard to differentiate.
GLM 5.3 is a hair behind these two.
An anecdote but not an original one from the people I talk to.
Fable is not a tool for the average user. It’s a professional tool for highly complex work.
I would compare it to a extremely high end $15k PC, or an expensive pro-grade video camera, or a freight train, or a …
I would say at least 95% of the global population will not encounter a situation once in their life where it would be actually useful/warranted.
I wish Fable were as good as you make it sound. A plan created by Fable is good, but in my case, it always contain issues caught only when it's reviewed again (whether by itself, Opus, Sol etc.). That's (almost) not different from plans created by Sol, GLM 5.3 etc. The one thing where it's genuinely better is the front-end, but then again it's far from perfect, it just needs less iterations.
It works much better on regular software development e.g. for complex refactoring where cheaper models would produce a lot of garbage results.
Yeah this is a fair point. I only go to it when I have some big architectural problem I want its help in working out. Or a super nasty bug.
You have a $3 trillion bubble riding on this not being true.
Right? If we’ve already reached ‘good enough’ then there’s rough waters ahead.
http://archive.today/ZLojz
"Almost Nobody Is Using Anthropic’s Fable 5" - https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-features/almost-nobody-is-u...
I've always wondered why everyone flocks to SV's latest darling company. Have we not learned from our history of glorifying these SV darlings that turn hostile?
I think the glib answer is, “Greed blinds all”.
Most of the people pushing this are just hoping that they can cash out before the hype pops and financial gravity crashes the party. Sam Altman recently claiming that the singularity is here is so stupid on its face he should just be treated as what he is, a huckster.
None of this stuff ever made any sense on what it was being sold initially. It was always insulting that the media and business leaders tried to argue that the tech could replace entire call centers or vast swaths of entire industries.
People keep arguing, but it will or it has based on extrapolating certain, reasonable use cases. Klarna has shut up about replacing call centers with bots because Markov chains with memory only can do so much.
Are people flocking to them? I see people buy the products but if you ask I think they are just about as hated in the big techs.
Absolutely zero people, rounding up generously, are replacing Fable with local or Chinese models.
I am because Claude has figured out I am a biochemist and therefore even asking Fable what the weather is gets me bumped back to Opus, sometimes even Opus 4.8 instead of 5. Kimi? GLM 5.3? DeepSeek? No such problem.
I can literally open a new chat with just "Hello" and it gets bumped.
Just cancelled my Claude subscription and used Ox Alpha Free through OpenCode (so that's one).
In my view, from the testing I did since Thursday, it's better than Fable. I had just finished a rather large task that Fable completed, including a /review and an /ultrareview.
Ox Alpha found bugs that Fable and Opus missed, and it continued to build things like a pro.
It does have issues with availability - but it's on a free promo right now. That also means that I don't know how much it would have cost if I had to pay API prices for it, which might not be cheaper than the subsidized small company / consumer usage, but for large companies paying API prices for either offering, the difference will be considerable.
Intriguing. Who is it? What is it? any ideas?
https://openrouter.ai/stealth/ox-alpha
I almost feel like there's some sort of paid campaign going on in Hacker News promoting the Chinese/open models. I feel like every day I'm hearing about how the frontier labs are dead but your experience is the same as mine. My company pays for Claude AND Codex but we never really use the open models for anything critical.
Doesn’t matter if your company pays for Claude, Anthropic and OpenAI valuations and expenditures commitment requires them to win the vast majority of the market to make economical sense. And the Chinese competition makes that very unlikely, to say the least. They likely won’t disappear fully but their “free” lunch as the AI darlings is done, on paper. Will be interesting to see how they adapt
It's absolutely a campaign. Every time anyone says anything about Claude, immediately and inorganically there's a bunch of people claiming to be biochemists who are constantly shut down by their work, people saying that they run out of tokens instantly even on Premium, people saying they get even better results on their GTX 4050, and people saying that Grok is better, or OpenAI is better. It's probably several different campaigns each run by different tranches of the competition. Reminds me of the good old days in which every criticism of bitcoin was immediately jumped on by nine or ten pretend Venezuelans who asserted that it was the only thing permitting their family to evade government currency controls.
Reads like: brilliant Carnegie Mellon University computer science grad struggles to find job where he is not replaced by cheap, inferior Indian labor that still gets the job done, even if it takes marginally longer.
No shit we're all paying 清冲 Flash to do the grunt work. Turns out though, paying 清冲 Flash a few more cents does exactly what Ivy Wasp Pro Mythical does. Crazy how that works.
Every software engineer in my company uses Claude code heavily. However we’ve never enabled Fable and only use Opus, Sonnet and Haiku.
Nobody has complained and seems like for every use case we have Opus is more than powerful enough, especially with Opus 5