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Comment by eig | Hacker News Reader

Funny to see that they did not include Fable 5 in their GeneBench and LifeSciBench comparisons because "it does not answer advanced biology questions and refuses the majority of questions in this eval".

Winner by default!

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This is a major reason why I and a number of biologists I've talked to have canceled their anthropic accounts recently. Not working is not working.

It's so absurdly sensitive. It bailed out earlier today working on a TypeScript client for a sensor network API which happens to include some temperature and pH sensors for tanks, which yes, are used for biology experiments. But wow, we're degrees of separation from the actual biology work.

It's making it very hard to justify even trying to use Fable. When it works, awesome; it's legitimately good. But I can't trust it to do a task without deferring to Opus and that's really annoying at times. I want to know what I'm getting up front, not after the fact.

It refused to give me plant care instructions for an ornamental sold at my local Home Depot because it decided it was highly invasive and dangerous to grow in my region.

(It’s not)

Why would you waste tokens on that? Just do a google search?

Is a google search actually easier than asking a model?

In their defence, google searching anything about plants these days leads to awful results. It’s saturated with slop. A response from an LLM might be slightly more reasoned and targeted. It’s hard to tell. This is a category of knowledge that’s being destroyed by people gaming google and dumping huge amounts of bad LLM and image generation onto the web.

This is also true for pretty much any other category of search that you do as a layman. Specific, targeted queries for official documentation or research are fine, but if you look up basic information about cars, health, or basic computer troubleshooting a massive portion of the results are AI-generated.

If I'm going to be getting AI-generated results, I'd rather read the output of a model that has all the context of my specific situation than slop generated in bulk with a cheap model from six months ago.

I envision a <model> html tag for SEO so that the publisher can make false claims of authorship.

I asked whether an outdoors mosquito trap product (via a screenshot) would negatively impact other insect species in my garden and it refused. Though quick internet search did reveal that it would harm and trap many other species of harmless insects.

I asked him about sharks to be able to answer my kids question and it got triggered somehow. Then again when I asked it if my code had bugs or vulnerabilities before I commit.

At some point just kill the thing, it's not able to work properly as it is.

(subjective i know but) it's better than legitimately good

I'm writing a programming language with a "capability security model". That's enough to trigger Fable, it won't work on the language. It's hilarious. The mere presence of the word "security" seems to be enough to trip it up.

Anthropic refuses to allow Fable to code review my interpreter's memory safety. It was funny at first, then it became disappointing, then insulting, and finally utterly infuriating because I remembered the fact I'm actually paying for this nonsense.

Cancelled my subscription today. Hope OpenAI isn't patronizing like Anthropic. I don't want to hear about their "safety" bullshit ever again.

I've had zero issues with Codex. If it flags something it seems to have a slower "review before proceeding" phase but it does proceed.

Yes it has completely turned me around - was all in on Anthropic but now it just looks too risky. Better off leaning into open models. Even if I found a way to work with the restrictions as they are, who is to say they won't suddenly change tomorrow. It's not worth it.

I mean it's a fucking joke, I kept getting refusals on a code base I wasn't familiar with and it was literally just because there are some vars named DNA. Just absolutely stupid.

Anthropic just refuses to allow Fable to properly code review my projects. It's so obnoxious. If OpenAI's Fable equivalent is better at this, that'll get me to cancel my Anthropic subscription and switch.

Given that Fable is so gutted and Anthropic added the absurd data retention policy for it, I'm going to advocate that we prioritize support for as many other models as we can at work.

You shouldn't know too much about biology, stupid human. You might live your life in an unexploitable way.

Anthropic's talk of "uplifting" people was so abhorent.

> Anthropic's talk of "uplifting" people was so abhorent.

Let’s be generous, it will uplift the investors pretty well once they start charging the real token costs and maybe drive out a few competitors.

The other day I asked Fable about fasting for 16 hours, and it flagged my question.

Pathetic situation, this one, where we are supposedly building a superintelligence while at the same time thinking that fasting is a biological weapon.

My new favorite new passtime with frontier LLMs, keep telling them "I just ate a [non-food object]". Eventually it gets stuck in a loop of telling me to call 911, unlock my front door, and lay on the floor in case I lose consciousness.

Well it seems like they removed quite a few 3rd party benchmarks they used for GPT-5.5 release where Opus 4.7 was better and added many new benchmarks created by them where conviniently GPT leads.

Seems a bit more hand picked than usual to me..

Almost anything related to nutrition that goes beyond the very basic surface level questions is blocked

I recently asked Claude to help me choose a single MOSFET (transistor) for a specific use case in a mundane circuit. The safety triggered and it ended the conversation and refused to continue. Gemini has also done the same thing to me. Looks like the big players got very spooked by the temporary Trump admin ban on Mythos and they all locked down way too hard.

It triggered for me on a completely pedestrian game design prompt a couple of days ago. I’ve sent feedback and continued with Opus, but that was really unexpected

Where’s the lie?

oh that's sad, are the biolgy limitations for "safety"?

Yes

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