Anthropic drama and a rare trading signal in precious metals
The White House unexpectedly banned Anthropic’s Fable on Friday using its export controls. Both the government and Amazon found reason to believe that the safeguards preventing Fable from being used as a cyberweapon could be bypassed. The best blow-by-blow account of the drama can be found in Politico. I chuckled at this part:
Bessent, Cairncross, chief of staff Susie Wiles and other senior officials met to discuss the model and the administration’s response, according to the administration official and the senior White House official. Bessent joined remotely while traveling to Houston for a previously scheduled public event, one of them said.
Following the meeting, the administration attempted to reach Amodei but was told he was unavailable because he was attending a wellness retreat, one of the administration officials and the senior White House official said.
A spokesperson for Anthropic rejected the claim that he was at a wellness retreat, saying, “this is absolutely false.”
I wonder what kind of wellness retreat Amodei was at. Ayahuasca anyone?
I fortunately had the chance to work with Fable for a couple days before it went down, and I was amazed. I gave it one of my most ambitious projects that I’ve been putting off for a while - creating an investment dashboard for all of my VC funds, direct investments, and hedge funds. I was previously managing all of this on Excel and manually inputting data from NAV statements, capital calls, and distributions.
I spent about 30 minutes crafting a prompt, and after I fed it to Fable, it created a working prototype of what I needed within an hour. I then spent another half day adding and experimenting with new features.
The dashboard gives me a birds eye view of the value and performance of my entire portfolio and can give me the same information on each individual statement. It also calculates MOIC, IRR, and tracks calls and distributions. The dashboard can also ingest new statements as I download them to my hard drive and update each investment with the new data. For privacy concerns, the software and data all live locally on my computer and don’t need to touch the internet or run through cloud models. Even the LLM sits locally on my laptop, a feature you can install via Ollama.
The ultimate product achieves a similar purpose as Dynamo or Albourne, software that costs tens of thousands of dollars per year and sometimes requires a full headcount within an investment firm to maintain and update. I think building this software would have taken a lot more time and headache using Opus or Codex. Building the dashboard felt effortless, and the rare moments when I bumped into a problem Fable couldn’t fix on its first try, I just gave it a loop by telling it to keep testing and fixing it until it worked.
Once Fable is up and running again, I’ll have it work on another project that I previously used Opus for - analyzing the ingredients of all the supplements I take and producing a report on all the interactions between them and recommending the best time of day to take them.
Other links and stories
A great episode about long-term investing in technology - very applicable to today’s environment
The bullish case for the SpaceX IPO
Open Router now has an API that sends your prompts to multiple models, analyzes each responses, and fuses them into what it think is the best output. They claim it provides Fable-level intelligence at half the price.
In the paid subscriber section: A rare signal in precious metals that I’m trading on
