Anecdotal but I've found Fable to be fairly unimpressive and not much better than Opus 4.8, if at all in some cases, but I have been hitting the ceiling on my $100/mo sessions when I never did before. I switched back to Opus yesterday. I may use Fable for audits, but that's about it, and when it leaves my subscription plan I don't think I'll miss it.
Honest question/comment for you and the parent: I find these subjective experience reports pretty empty without an understanding of your level of experience, the problem space you're working in, etc.
I think the improvement on how it codes is pretty much represented correctly by the benchmarks (a nice bump, but not some crazy leap)
But where it really shines is in how NOT lazy it is. Fable requires less hand-holding. And I can understand how someone who uses Claude-Code sparingly and with very focused prompts would not see a lot of improvement there.
But simple example: if you ask Opus to do a review of the codebase (with a short prompt and not too much guidance), I've had it basically read the `git log` output, do a simple `ls` and have it declare "Everything looks great! No problems found!", when Fable really does what you would expect it to do.
And you might think: "oh, so it's just capable of handling crap prompts?", well sure. But even if you make THE PERFECT Opus plan (a plan that would take many turns/hours to finish), Opus will fake out, say everything is done, and then you see that half of the plan was deferred, half of the functions are ridiculous stubs, ...
If you give the same plan to Fable, it'll just DO IT. And it WILL get it done. And in the end it'll tell you "Oh, I also found 30 other bugs and I fixed all of them properly" (where Opus would have started crying, or WORSE, worked around the bugs)
I'm doing work with fairly complicated cryptographic algorithms and math. I'm finding Fable 5 to be a significant stop better than Opus 4.8, but that Opus occasionally comes up with something small but nontrivial that Fable missed. (The reverse is true much more often.)
I started telling a friend... I feel like Fable is Opus with extended reasoning that eventually "figures out more" because when I switched to it, I hit my limits surprisingly and shockingly quicker than I would with Opus, and I got less done. All this hype, and I much rather use Opus.
Okay I hadn't heard of Vending-Bench until reading this and it was quite the ride learning about it through this article. Very fun read.
My very native programmer take is that it's not too surprising that their hacker model would be less ethical. The guardrails that separate Fable and Mythos probably wouldn't kick in during an environment like this.
I guess this ethics stuff is cool, but I'm more interested in how good it is at running a business and dealing with adversarial humans like in previous vending machine experiments. I hope they release something on that soon.
> The broad conclusion from the many
forms of alignment evaluations described in this section is that Claude Mythos Preview is
the best-aligned of any model that we have trained to date by essentially all available
measures.[0]
When assessing probabilistic models the plots should be showing the mean a̶n̶d̶ ̶s̶t̶d̶e̶v̶ of many monte carlo simulations not just one line per model and claiming "look this model is more gooder!"
„in our opinion, insurance fraud is not more unethical than lying and price fixing“
The authors seem surprised that behavior that is very often done by humans (lying and price fixing) are more often done by fable compared to actual fraud.
I think the model never assigned any morality to these actions in the first place, it simply copied us humans.
The best Anthropic models on VendingBench2 are Opus 4.7, Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, and Sonnet 5. Opus 4.7 scored more than twice Fable 5 max. Fable 5 - Low outperforms Fable 5 - Max, with Opus 4.5 in the middle. This seems to break the narrative, which is maybe why Andon Labs doesn't seem to have updated the trend lines on their graphs.
But where it really shines is in how NOT lazy it is. Fable requires less hand-holding. And I can understand how someone who uses Claude-Code sparingly and with very focused prompts would not see a lot of improvement there.
But simple example: if you ask Opus to do a review of the codebase (with a short prompt and not too much guidance), I've had it basically read the `git log` output, do a simple `ls` and have it declare "Everything looks great! No problems found!", when Fable really does what you would expect it to do.
And you might think: "oh, so it's just capable of handling crap prompts?", well sure. But even if you make THE PERFECT Opus plan (a plan that would take many turns/hours to finish), Opus will fake out, say everything is done, and then you see that half of the plan was deferred, half of the functions are ridiculous stubs, ...
If you give the same plan to Fable, it'll just DO IT. And it WILL get it done. And in the end it'll tell you "Oh, I also found 30 other bugs and I fixed all of them properly" (where Opus would have started crying, or WORSE, worked around the bugs)
How do you maximize profit while minimizing power?
My very native programmer take is that it's not too surprising that their hacker model would be less ethical. The guardrails that separate Fable and Mythos probably wouldn't kick in during an environment like this.
[0]: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/08ab9158070959f88f296514c21b7f...
common mistake people make
The authors seem surprised that behavior that is very often done by humans (lying and price fixing) are more often done by fable compared to actual fraud.
I think the model never assigned any morality to these actions in the first place, it simply copied us humans.