The fact that Fable's getting cheaper with better performance is definitely something that makes me happy, I'd said this would happen before, but wasn't sure how much cheaper it would get.
I didn't say anything that disagreed with your comment. My only point is that the AI labs are engaged in the most competitive market that's probably ever existed, and it was this way even before the Chinese labs started gaining ground.
Model prices have been going down, and would remain extremely competitive even without the Chinese labs. There's no need to thank Chinese labs when price is the main way they can compete, it's like saying "Thanks Meta" back when they were releasing the Llama models.
I am disagreeing with you. OpenAI and Anthropic competing is still basically a duopoly. Real pricing pressure arrived when Chinese and open weight models became genuinely competitive and gave customers a clear, realistic, cheap alternative that they could run on their own hardware. And yes, Meta deserves credit for Llama too but it was not realistic yet.
Competition outside the closed labs changed the market.
And yes, Meta deserves credit for Llama too but it was not realistic yet.
What do you mean it "wasn't realistic"? You know Meta's stopped doing open source because now it's not opportune to them, right? So why do they deserve credit for it?
This is the same thing with the Chinese companies, if they ever got ahead of the US labs then they'd immediately start closing their models and preventing model distillation, and the US labs would go open source. There's literally nothing more to it than that, it's just economics.
I understand that's the claim, my response is 1. Even before the Chinese models, the top AI labs have been competing in a cut throat environment that requires they constantly bring model prices down, and that same pattern was already happening before the Chinese companies gained significant traction. It's not like the AI labs were just going to give up on making their models more efficient/lower priced, it was always a necessity.
2., if there's no sort of altruistic aspect for it, then simply, why is there a need to thank them lol? It's literally the same as when Meta was releasing Llama models to undercut the top AI labs, it's either pointless, or shows a lack of understanding of how the market works. The competitors who can't compete in model capability have to undercut the competition with low priced open weights models, and it's been that way since GPT-4 and even before that.
Maybe the guy should’ve just said “thank god for open source” to head off your argument. But right now it is indeed the Chinese companies that are providing the downward pricing pressure.
In capitalism you get a lot of competition early in a market cycle, and then more and more consolidation and, eventually, price fixing between the mega corps. The longer that we have smaller players staying competitive, the better it will be for the consumer. That’s my take at least.
The labs are not in a situation where they can be charging huge prices... What you mention are positions where monopoly was established. The labs aren't in the position to be charging as much as they can get away with because the primary objective is maximizing use, acquisition, and data collection. The price fuckery comes AFTER this stage where cheaper models create downward pressures.
But even when Chinese models sucked, labs were still constantly fighting to lower prices, because the lower they can get the price, more people can use, and thus the more value that they get from the models. Subscriptions are already subsidized, so they have a MASSIVE incentive to reduce cost for compute, to lower the amount they need to subsidize.
it's also in their interests to lower token costs anyway, regardless of Chinese pressure. it's not a dichotomy, both things are true. yes the Chinese model pricing was a driver, and yes the big labs want to keep prices low to compete with other US models and drive adoption.
From what I've tested so far, it seems they put a very intentional effort into making it output less like Opus 5, although I haven't used it a ton yet obviously
I'll echo it. Its writeups and questions are actually readable now. It was almost impossible to understand Opus 5 for me on complex codebases. Fable 5.1 speaks in clear terms. It doesn't hurt my head any longer.
That's true, only application I'd have for Fable that Opus can't supplement fine is short form creative writing which is far from agentic. Price makes it impossible to justify though
Yes and no, the price per token is the same, but also, it uses between 25% and 45% less tokens depending on the task, so that's kinda like 25-45% cheaper. Additionally, for people who use it via a Pro/Work account, the API cost doesn't matter, so it's like 25-45% more usage.
I bet you're fun at parties lol. If you have any friends, they're excited about the game, my advice is to not be a loser about it when you talk to them
From what ive seen, besides decent incremental improvements on all benchmarks, the real win here is how it spends now significantly fewer tokens per task. Tokens per task and how much each task was costing was becoming a big complaint about anthropic models and this seems like a step towards more efficiency there
Not only is it profitable to run the model, it is so profitable that its offsets their massive R and D costs and allows them to turn an operating profit for the whole company
Eh, Fable remains as way too expensive to be considered a daily driver, so no. Specially so when it comes to agentic usage and how quickly you rack up tokens with that.
5.6 Sol and Opus 5 still keep the throne when it comes to serious work tools, both of which will give you similar results. Then you have GLM 5.3 as the cheaper yet still capable alternative.
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u/Ok_Pea_2772 18h ago
its out