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> Listen - that's the sound of millions of companies and users doubling down on Chinese models. They’re falling back to Opus 4.8. Most people weren’t using Fab
by Aurornis 5mo ago
> Listen - that's the sound of millions of companies and users doubling down on Chinese models.
They’re falling back to Opus 4.8. Most people weren’t using Fable for everything anyway because it’s so expensive.
None of open weights models are even at Opus 4.8 levels. If someone was using Fable they don’t have any second best alternative outside of Anthropic.
- itopaloglu83 5mo agoA sample of one, but I was getting more stuff done despite Fable uses tokens twice as fast as Opus, because it understood the goals so well and worked to achieve them.
- consumer451 5mo agoSame here, now n=2.
- toss1 5mo agoSame here, not n=3, plus the above 3 reporting, so n=6 and rising Fable was definitely better for a variety of tasks, even accounting for using 2X the token rate, like the way it used the tokens faster reduced the wasted tokens, as least for the subset of those who already knew at least some optimizations...?
- 2001zhaozhao 5mo ago> more stuff done More stuff done per dollar or more stuff done for more dollars? Seems to be an important distinction
- itopaloglu83 5mo agoGiven the same usage limits, I was able to get more stuff done and not even hit the usage limits, because I wasn't working on constantly fixing what Opus was trying to do, Fable just understands the task correctly and works great with the given context.
- pshc 5mo agoSame, I was actually having interesting thought experiments with Fable.
- malshe 5mo agoI even upgraded my Max plan because Fable was doing so well.
- hodgehog11 5mo agoSame experience. Wouldn't waste my tokens on easy stuff for it. It blasted through some of my toughest problems and produced some truly great code.
- mk89 5mo agoCan you give an example of what those "toughest problems/great code" are? I don't need to know the prompt nor the output, but the general idea, what it is about.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- hodgehog11 5mo agoSome very tough computational geometry problems I couldn't solve on my own, nor with the assistance of other AIs or my colleagues. Fable did them all first go. The most impressive built a custom optimizer with a ludicrous number of adaptive switches that absolutely crunched through an error surface with a bunch of nontrivial nullspaces and some wild curvature. That optimizer is of independent interest; it's not totally novel in theory, but the implementation is an impressive piece of engineering.
- mk89 5mo agoWas it a better prompt? Have you tried giving the same prompt to other models? I have found out that the mistakes of other models (which I choose first to save money) help me refine the prompt more and more, until I am fed up and pick Opus 4.8 (for example) which magically seems to get it right, but there is a lot of pre-work there...
- hodgehog11 5mo agoYes I have tried giving these same prompts to other models. The difference has been painfully clear. Switching back to Opus, it is completely unable to do anything that I had asked of Fable without significant conceptual and engineering errors. Functioning code, sure, but not even remotely capable of accomplishing the task to the accuracy I need. Sonnet, GPT 5.5, Gemini, DeepSeek, it's all the same deal. I accepted this in the past because that was just how it was. Now it's tremendously irritating. I wish Fable really was only a minor upgrade so that it wouldn't be missed, but this feels like the difference between having a post-doctoral colleague and educating a student that I have to constantly guide and correct. It's so profound for me that some of the reactions in this thread feel like they come from another reality entirely. Or maybe they just got instantly diverted to Opus, who knows.
- cube00 5mo ago> Most people weren’t using Fable for everything anyway because it’s so expensive. Or they were getting silently rerouted and couldn't realise they weren't using Fable
- dbish 5mo agoYep. I love open source but there isn’t a model that comes close still to the closed source options like Opus 4.8 and that’s obvious from most people I see across the software industry as well. There are at least another few models after Opus from OpenAI and Anthropic most would go down the list using before any of the Chinese models at this point.
- sixothree 5mo agoI could really use something that can just refactor a few classes and create DTOs from entities.
- loeg 5mo ago> If someone was using Fable they don’t have any second best alternative outside of Anthropic. GPT-5.5 isn't awful.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoOpus 4.8 has taken such a beating over the last couple of days since the release of fable, videos online of people referring to it like the “redheaded stepchild” (is there a better way of saying this, this sounds racist) basically at this point, everyone is going to be seriously disappointed to fall back to that.
- nozzlegear 5mo ago> is there a better way of saying this, this sounds racist It's not racist or even politically incorrect in the US, it's a common saying.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoYes, I am aware. Kind of paints redheads as unwanted though. Seems hurtful.
- nozzlegear 5mo agoYeah, not sure where the phrase originated but it does sound bad when you put some thought into it. My sister is a redhead and people loved to make fun of her growing up, telling her there's no way two parents with brown hair could have a kid with red hair, so the mailman (who also had red hair) was obviously her dad.
- johndough 5mo agoAs a foreigner, the casual racism against red-haired people in the US and UK always baffled me.