Claude Fable is released
Today’s big news is that Claude Fable - a Mythos-class model - has been released. Early reviews are that it’s very powerful, it can work on tasks for much longer than previous models, and it costs 2x what Opus costs.
Ethan Mollick had an early trial of Mythos and he describes his experience here:
First, how good is Fable? In experiment after experiment I conducted, it outperformed basically every other public model I have used by a considerable margin. It was capable across many problems and produced some startling results — it would work up to a dozen hours executing on multi-page specifications. I’ll walk you through a couple of more complex, and serious, use cases shortly, but you could see the general improvement across the board on every task. The problem about communicating this in a post is that many of the most impressive results are going to be interesting to only small portions of my readers. For example, it made the most sophisticated academic social science paper I have yet seen from an AI from a single prompt and one piece of feedback. It also created a 10-page epic rhyming poem about a haircut where every word starts with the letter s.
So, as a more accessible and entertaining example, I also had it create a bunch of games you can try. All of these are one initial prompt in Claude Code where Fable had to take my vague prompts and generate something workable, followed by a couple of additional prompts with minor encouragement (“make it better”) or feedback. What makes these especially impressive is that Claude cannot generate images, so every piece of art or 3D object was made with math alone, not using any external assets. You can try any of them: a game about flipping coins (prompt: “Balatro, but for the game of coin flips”) that is quite fun; a snake game where the snake is self-aware and crazy things happen; or a game about descending into the depths to see what is there.
So the output is impressive. But, especially as I turned to more serious projects, I often felt using the tool was somewhere between delightful and unnerving. Delightful because I just asked for something at it happened. And also unnerving because I just asked for something and it happened.
To avoid Fable being used for bioweapons and cyber attacks, it created some safeguards that automatically route you to weaker models if your prompt has anything to do with bioweapons or cyber. It’s an interesting way of getting around the safety problem and I’m curious to see if people figure out how to get around the safeguards with clever prompting.
AI News has a comprehensive rundown on what people are saying about Fable here. Fable will be included as part of the Pro plan until June 22, and after that it will be pay-as-you-go.
We have US CPI tomorrow, and some sharp analysts are saying it will come in weaker. Between the Fable release and a weaker than expected CPI, I can see a setup where AI stocks halt their recent selloff and recover.
Nilesh Jasani, the manager of the AI hedge fund GenInnov, wrote some great thoughts on how DRAM manufacturers are no longer commoditized like they once were. It’s still a cyclical industry with shortages and gluts, but they should not be valued like commodity producers.
Behind the paywall - recent adds and removals in the equity portfolio
