Tell HN: I'm not excited for Fable and am disappointed in Karpathy | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: I'm not excited for Fable and am disappointed in Karpathy

7 pointsbehnamoh10 comments

* High level reasons:

It increases the gap between the rich and the poor. You think indie devs and individuals have the resources to pay per token? The direction Anthropic is taking is one that leads to more inequality, only this time it's intelligence inequality between small and large corps.

Anthropic also intentionally crippled the model when it comes to doing AI research. And then Karpathy (an AI researcher who defected to Anthropic) has the audacity to praise the model?

These decisions were already made by Anthropic (a company that actively wants AI regulation and banning of open source models) BEFORE the USG request to take down the model, so they can't blame the politics for this.

* Earthly reasons:

We were originally going to get 100% usage from June 9th to June 23rd (15 days)

Instead we got 100% usage for 3 days and 50% usage for 7.

And it's nerfed on day 1:

> ... we're redeploying the model with a new set of classifiers to target and block more cybersecurity tasks. In the near term, some routine tasks like coding and debugging will fall back to Opus 4.8

If I want Fable-class of models, there's already GPT-5.5-pro (not accessible in Codex, for some reason) which I can use with my subscription. Nothing about Fable

Anthropic is a company which claims that the biggest threat AI has is inequality. This was communicated from the very beginning, before Claude and other public models.

OpenAI has also held the same stance in the past, hence the original plan to make everything "open".

Now ChatGPT and the $20/month ($10/month in developing countries) are a good way to make these tools accessible. Anthropic did this. This was fine. It hurts the poor to pay, but they can still pay for it.

But the new proposal to remove subscriptions is worrying.

Fable itself is worrying. It was terribly communicated to the media. It seems more like a model below Opus which is designed to run for several days straight, effectively replacing human oversight.

It's not cheap because it's not designed to be cheap. It's built to be cheaper than humans.

Anthropic thinks they’re managing safety. But they come across as just elitist. They appear to say only they should get to make safety decisions about their creations

But the conflict of interest is plain to outsiders. And they seem to lack skill in working with public institutions to create consistent safety legislation. Any regulations they advocate for just seem like rent seeking.

We just need people with expertise in government. Not Anthropic/OpenAI making these dumb decisions.

I have yet to be able to get a single request that isn't downgraded to Opus-4.8 fairly quickly -- my most recent request (in Claude Desktop instead of Claude Code, hoping for better results) was "Please read and analyze my recent sessions, and let's discuss any themes and patterns you notice in my usage" -- somehow this was a threat.

I've found Claude and GPT have converged again. The LLMs are bound to be commoditized, in 6 months, some open-source LLM will step in.

It's not nerfed, it just won't respond to "fix this code" when the code is insecure and will silently fall back to a weaker model.

I'm going to assume you're being ironic.

The real problem isn't that Fable has flaws, but that a maxed-out Fable might not be something everyone gets to have equally.

GLM 5.2 is already close to Fable. But none of this matters if people can't run the models on their own hardware.

They're different beasts. It's like comparing a donkey to a steam train.

GLM 5.2 can run for hours. Fable was supposedly designed for something that takes a human up to weeks. It's also more for straightforward tasks, so it'll do poorly in tasks that other models are great at.

words like 'inequality' and 'defected' tell me theese are ideologically charged expectations which might be the root cause of your disapointment

Give it time and open models will get close enough.

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