With this Fable release my goodwill for Anthropic went down.
"Generous and exciting" were my thoughts when I bought the $100, then upgraded to the $200 sub last year. Now I get big FOMO because I won't be able to pay for Fable once off the sub, and I got the global limit reset at the same time as my weekly reset (Codex coupon for limit reset feels way better btw). The all-you-can-eat buffet put the nice items into a separate menu and it won't feel like the spot to take your family anymore.
Anthropic can find ways to integrate Fable into subscriptions so you'd still be part of the same tribe, even if you only get a sip of it for a while. A complete shut off tells you: sorry, the policy is changing and this place will be about showing off your access to the best.
That's weird but what would have been a Fable-ulous (sorry) addition to the offer just made other subscriptions from OpenAI/ZAi/... more appealing, because they don't segregate people.
Codex is more generous with their subscribers because they are second place, and have to climb the reputation ladder. I suspect if OpenAI was in Anthropic's market position they too would have tighter sub limits, gate-keep where their oauth tokens can be used tighter, and play games that move users towards per-token spend.
In popularity. Which is crazy because they are first when it comes to everything else for quite some time and Fable isn't changing that all that much because of muzzling.
Yes, I distinctly remember the recent past when the roles were reversed, and Anthropic was the kind good hearted startup trying to compete with big evil OpenAI corporation.
Wonder how many times we get to see it flip back and forth before this bubble explodes.
I lost all my goodwill for Anthropic the moment I read the bit about how the model would intentionally degrade its performance without telling the user (in other words, sabotage) if it detected frontier level AI research. How could I know it wasn’t going to kick in as I used it to develop a regular ML model? How can I trust such a system? It’s good that they walked it back but I’m looking to jump ship now.
Use /model in Claude Code to see your current model and switch models. Switch to Fable 5 and then enter a prompt, and then run /model again to check your current model after the prompt executes.
Last night after almost every prompt it says...
Fable 5's safeguards flagged this message. The safeguards are intentionally broad right now and may flag safe and routine coding, cybersecurity, or biology work. These measures let us bring you Mythos-level capabilities sooner, and we're working to refine them. Switched to Opus 4.8. Send feedback with /feedback or learn more
> I won't be able to pay for Fable once off the sub
With the sub, I asked Fable one question (yeah granted it was a complicated question involving integer linear programming, and I gave Fable two pieces of code to check for equivalence), and I ran out of credits before Fable had finished thinking.
I still find things exciting, but sure they are not generous.
Wait, will it downgrade to Opus even when using with extra usage? So you pay a hefty amount up to the point where the model needs to do Real Work then it quits?
I don't understand why simonw's comment is dead, because he mentions a real counterpoint to the video: API token prices are NOT the raw costs for any provider. I'd even say that inference needs to have quite a juicy margin to cover for all the other costs. It would make no business sense to sell API tokens at a loss: nobody knows yet how to price intelligence, so why start in the red when it's the only source of revenue?
It's a different story for subscriptions. According to my rough computation (N=1), a Claude Max 20x at $200 gives you access to around $8k worth of tokens per month – but they don't cost Anthropic $8k! – and there I think they'd make a loss on every token maxxer which may or may not be compensated by subscriptions that are not used. But that's not the end of the subscription story.
Once you are "enterprise" you pay for token use and there is no way around it: Anthropic does it and so does OpenAI. The subscription is the gateway drug to token maxxing. When people are hired in an Enterprise job, they'll come with their habit of using AI for all and any task.
All to say that: yes, AI labs are bleeding money but on everything else – datacenters, training models, talent,...
> It would make no business sense to sell API tokens at a loss: nobody knows yet how to price intelligence, so why start in the red when it's the only source of revenue?
All VC funded businesses start selling in the red. What makes you think these ones are going to be different?
Huh, I had not realized my comment was [dead] - it's here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492313 (I see it as not-dead, which I guess is how the dead system works) (UPDATE: it's no longer dead)
I was calling out the video for starting with:
> If you paid for that usage through a standard API, those 10 billion tokens would cost you around $15,000 a year. That is the real unsubsidized price. No discounts, no incentives, just the raw compute costs.
When "raw compute costs" is entirely misleading to describe API pricing.
> According to my rough computation (N=1), a Claude Max 20x at $200 gives you access to around $8k
According to my own personal `cc-usage` script, I'm just about to hit $15k in the past 30 days, and that's about half 5x and half 20x. And I'm not someone running openclaw or letting my agents spin around 24/7 - this is just very active agentic coding, where I'm constantly involved.
> It would make no business sense to sell API tokens at a loss: nobody knows yet how to price intelligence, so why start in the red when it's the only source of revenue?
The only consistent bullet point in the playbook of venture capital-driven startups for the last 30 years is to sell $1 bills for $0.50 and then hope to make it up in volume.
Nice idea but I'm missing the specialty bins that actually make Gridfinity useful: bins for storing the AA/AAA batteries vertically, for SD cards and USB keys, for a caliper, tape measure,...
With plain bins, you don't get the "this tool can only be stored there" lemma that changes how you think when you have a lot of tools. If a tool has only one place to go: 1) either it's there or it's used on a work surface, 2) it goes back there and not in a possibly-related dump (does this special double-sided tape go with all the tapes or with the leatherworking supplies?)
For other Gridfinity content:
- Generate a specific bin for your tool: https://www.tooltrace.ai/
- Generic bin generator: https://gridfinity.perplexinglabs.com/pr/gridfinity-rebuilt/0/0
- Hub for links: https://gridfinity.xyz/
Electricity price is a weird beast. Everyone has to pay the price of the most expensive electricity source (generally gas plants) that was recruited to respond to the power demand. It means that during a spike the electricity price can double or triple.
What I infer from Anthropic post is that they will estimate the energy price as if they weren't using it and pay the difference if their use upped the price.
Gas plants are only the most expensive in the simple cycle configuration. Combined cycle plants are competitive with other forms of baseload generation. The trouble is the response time.
With day ahead forecasting, we can try to turn that peak load into base load. Grid operations are a non trivial part in how this AI energy situation plays out.
Batteries are an even bigger deal. You can completely stop building single stage peaker gas turbines when it gets economical to just drop a 2GW / 1 GWh battery pack next to every gas plant. When demand spikes, you just discharge the battery while you heat soak the steam turbine and the drum to prepare it for increased load.
We’re too busy cranking out disposable e-cig cartridge batteries with our limited battery capacity. It’s like we know what’s right but just can’t seem to do it.
disposable e-cig cartridge batteries are a disgrace and should be illegal, but that's not hindering grid scale battery build out.
First of all, the resources those tiny batteries use are less than a drop in the bucket of what we ideally would like to add to the grid, and secondly, we're currently nowhere close to being limited by battery capacity. China alone had the industrial capacity to produce more than 2 TWh of new batteries last year, but they actually produced a bit less than 1 TWh because there was no market demand for this many batteries.
They just overbuilt production capacity by over 100%, per their industrial policy.
Shouldn't future contract sellers be smart enough to take these aspects in account? So you might not pay the spot price. But overall you will cover it. As those selling futures are there to make money. So they charge more than they pay for the power.
A well crafted policy that, I think, will be adopted by many OSS.
You'd need that kind of sharp rules to compete against unhinged (or drunken) AI drivers and that's unfortunate. But at the same time, letting people DoS maintainers' time at essential no cost is not an option either.
Looks slick! In the >50" category, I've recently upgraded from the Samsung Odyssey G9 49" (with res 2x1440p) to a Samsung Odyssey G9 57" (2x4K). With a tiling window manager and workspaces it's really a pleasure to use, and contrarily to some beliefs, I do more focused work that way because I don't have to switch workspace to find the information I'm looking for – less risk of distraction.
I've linked it multiple times on HN already but winapps (https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps) can be a game-changer for people relying on some Windows-only software.
It sets up a Windows machine in Docker where you can install your apps, then you'll get .desktop applications that starts the program in the VM and use RDP to only show the app window – it feels nearly native. I've even bought an Office 2024 license to improve some VBA Excel macros for a client.
It's funny how there are operations so sensitive to latency that even half a second feels too long.
However I agree with other comments that the author's baseline of 380ms is suspicious. I get 150ms (full config, 6 plugins) vs 50ms with no config and plugins.
"Generous and exciting" were my thoughts when I bought the $100, then upgraded to the $200 sub last year. Now I get big FOMO because I won't be able to pay for Fable once off the sub, and I got the global limit reset at the same time as my weekly reset (Codex coupon for limit reset feels way better btw). The all-you-can-eat buffet put the nice items into a separate menu and it won't feel like the spot to take your family anymore.
Anthropic can find ways to integrate Fable into subscriptions so you'd still be part of the same tribe, even if you only get a sip of it for a while. A complete shut off tells you: sorry, the policy is changing and this place will be about showing off your access to the best.
That's weird but what would have been a Fable-ulous (sorry) addition to the offer just made other subscriptions from OpenAI/ZAi/... more appealing, because they don't segregate people.