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In case you're unaware, this is for the max setting. The (recommmended) high setting uses only 80k tokens.

Its still prohibitively expensive, and models 5% the cost are faster and get the job done just as well (for the average person's workflow).

I really don't get the value proposition of these massive models, seems like they're just loss leaders simply to say you're the in the top 3. There's not much use cases outside of niche academic research (and even then I question the need). They mostly function as marketing tools, like a casino that offers high roller accommodations.

People will say "cyber" but companies didnt want to spend on security before, not sure why they would all of a sudden be compelled to spend even more.


Not everyone is writing CRUD business apps and personal use software. Pretty much any model can do those now. The frontier is for doing things those models struggle with. Even in vibe coding a simple video game the difference in results between an open source model, the previous frontier model, and the current model is pretty huge.

Security is mandatory now in a way that it wasn't, now that AI has eliminated the skill barrier to hacking.


The llm induced Dunning Kruger is getting really old.

You dont need Fable to do most things. Your video game is still a "CRUD" app and you certainly wont make a great video game because you have access to fable. But marketing works well, people actually believe they can buy competency for themselves.

It hasnt eliminated the barrier to hacking. Please go find me a valid crit on any program on h1 with your fable 5.2 within the next 3 days, Ill bet my entire life savings it can't, and if you did it would cost 3x the bounty. You've been reading too much engagement farming articles/posts

Security has always been highly important, not any more than it is now. Companies are not going to suddenly start spending six figures on fable to protect themselves from imaginary AI powered hackers.

Its there for people who fall for cheap marketing who thnk they can shortcut meritocracy and make video games, or do security research with no skill. Good luck! Dont max out your CCs on llms.


Reminds me of how I always see people on X announce to no one in particular that they use Fable on xhigh for everything. Like it's a status symbol to run a more expensive, bigger, slower model for Git CLI commands and to summarize their emails or whatever.

I think the general notion that a lot of people are using models that are overpowered for their use case is right, but I think the big question is where the line actually is and how many people fit on either side. My suspicion based on my experience is that there are significantly more people on the "actually need the frontier model" side than the bear case suggests, but I'm not speaking with any authoritative data here and could be totally wrong.

I used to work on evals/observability at Opik: https://github.com/comet-ml/opik And I can say from working with lots of users running agents at scale, there is definitely a pretty commonly reached frontier of difficulty/complexity/abstraction where the capability difference between something like Fable/Astra and smaller models is a big deal. I find this to be especially true the more autonomous your workflow gets. You can still often tackle the hardest tasks with something like Opus, it just typically involves more direct intervention and design work from the user.

But again, this is just anecdata on my part. All of this is still pretty ambiguous and lots of companies are trying to solve the problem of matching models to task difficulty (I.e. routers), with varying degrees of success.


Fable 5.2 on low is both cheaper and more intelligent than Opus 5.5 on high. Prohibitively expensive is a gross oversimplification.

People looking at frontier models release are not the average person, and let's say that you pay $150 with Fable to save $1000*, it's much more interesting than using $10 with a cheap model to save even $500.

*Scale numbers to whatever suits you.


If you think llm usage provide that much value I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.. Their main value is as a tool for wage theft (which im cool with, jusy recognize it), so lazy people can cheat at their jobs and get by doing less. Basically every RFH engineer admits this to me. Work two hours, company pays for 8 plus a tool that does mediocre work, that everyone else has access too and thus provides no edge.

Fable class models are for people who fall for cheap marketing and are lazy and think they can now bypass a meritocracy and buy themselves competency. Really they'll just continue to be lazy, and the people with more competency will run circles around them with 1/10th the amount or llm usage, or none at all.


Well for tasks that can be done with another model you just use another model.

^ and even at medium it is juuuust outside their "Most attractive quadrant"

Did you ever pause to consider that theoretical computer science might not be done for the sake of midwit code monkeys whose deepest contact with complexity theory was when they learned to reverse a linked list in O(n) for their SWE interview?

I'm not sure that retreating to the ivory tower is a winning rhetorical strategy.

Not sure why the hostility anyways. If appreciating TCS results really is a higher brow activity, then GP's indignation at computational models shouldn't upset you, quite the opposite. It's definitionally the normal experience.

And while I do find the blogpost in the OP trite, that is mostly because it's from someone who should absolutely be more intimate with the subject than such "midwitted code monkeys" (aka. normal people) you refer to, yet pretends to feel duped by OAI's results. Quite the different case, and I think is much more worthy of ridicule as a result. They're the high brow who should be appreciating, understanding, yet fail to.


Where do you think the money comes from, and why do you think that is?

indeed, the purpose of theoretical computer science is as a filtering and ranking mechanism for awarding tenure in universities

I assume that you'd also argue in favour of working in a team with an average IQ of 80 as opposed to 120.


I can confirm that you're reading this incorrectly. There's a reason behind them only comparing it to open-source models released months ago. Here's a good aggregator: https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence


Okay, so instead it's just another slower more expensive DeepSeek v4.1 Flash.

That seems much more realistic.


the next few years are going to be rough for you...


People told me that in 2018, too. Glad that I didn't listen.


just like they RPed disproving the erdos conjecture


So you're distraught at losing the ability to abuse digital minds? Excellent, I'm glad Anthropic introduced this.


When did we establish matrix multiplication at scale was a “mind” ?


I haven't estabilished the jumble of neurons in your skull to be a "mind" either.


Quite a fitting response from a non-mind.


Yes, in the same way I like to kill the enemies in DOOM.

It's matrix multiplication. Absurd.


> It's matrix multiplication.

Hilarious critique. If you weren't as mathematically illiterate as you likely are, you would know how general matrix operations are, and how essentially any algorithm (including human cognition) can be implemented using them as an intermediate.


I'm not. But I'll concede you are possibly more literate - I won't dox myself on this account.

Congratulations.

If you honestly argue that LLM computation and human cognition are equivalent there is no further argument to be had - it's immediately a philosophical or worse a religious argument that cannot be won.

However, that we're even arguing on that level baffles me. How did this happen! They're glorified calculators.

They really marketed the hell (sorry) out of LLMs.


> uses a specific, objectively nonsensical critique of LLMs (the idea that an algorithm using matrix operations as a primitive cannot emulate "true" intelligence)

> receives pushback on the specific, objectively nonsensical critique

> "oh so you're saying that LLM computation and human cognition are equivalent? they're glorified calculators that disprove the Jacobian conjecture!!!"


>the idea that an algorithm using matrix operations as a primitive cannot emulate "true" intelligence

I did not say that. Not even close.

In the words of Claude: I’ll end the conversation here. <end_conversation>


Being correct doesn't give you licence to use insults.


You have unduly assumed that «drop the abuse» implied an «abuse digital minds».

"Expletives" are part of the proper description of facts (typically "to be judged as such") - they are part of the serious assessment of things and as such are normally found. There is no legitimate assumption from the post that they may have been used as gratuitous insults.


There’s no way you actually believe these word-predictors are actually thinking, right?


"Thinking" seems to be a political term now, people have completely different definitions of it, based on how they wish the world to be organised, and find defining it differently offensive.


you'd be surprised. Many having no mind of their own seek it elsewhere.


update: a safe decoder has been released in v0.3.0, and it's nearly as performant as the unsafe one


Yes, the most similar one is indeed Selkie.

misa77 and oodle are both supported in turbobench (see: https://github.com/powturbo/turbobench), so it's easy to compare them.

Results on the silesia corpus on the same Intel setup described in the README, using turbobench:

  codec       decode      ratio    encode
  misa77 -0   5309 MB/s   42.64%   58.2 MB/s
  misa77 -1   4332 MB/s   39.65%   54.5 MB/s
  selkie -1   3095 MB/s   43.48%   197 MB/s
  selkie -2   3013 MB/s   41.80%   163 MB/s
  selkie -3   3081 MB/s   39.58%   95.8 MB/s
  selkie -4   3498 MB/s   36.95%   43.3 MB/s
  selkie -5   2607 MB/s   33.58%   2.97 MB/s
  lz4         2530 MB/s   47.60%   373 MB/s
Note: selkie -4 corresponds to the "Normal" level here.


Any chance you can throw lzop into that table just as a reference point?


Added memcpy in here too, same setup as before:

  codec       decode        ratio     encode
  misa77 -0   5302 MB/s     42.64%    58.7 MB/s
  selkie -3   3078 MB/s     39.58%    97.0 MB/s
  lzo1x -1    421 MB/s      47.48%    314 MB/s
  memcpy      12135 MB/s    100.00%   11952 MB/s


I'll be resolving issues 2 and 3 in the next couple of weeks (adding a safe decoder and doing a lot of fuzzing).

The format, however, might continue to change for some time because I want to push performance even further.


Which is great and please don't take this as me being critical of the approach you are taking. I think it's perfectly reasonable during early development have your compressed stream in flux.

I've been bitten in the past with other libs that weren't as explicit about their stability.


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