alt Hacker NewsAnthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
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They've put themselves in a corner. Fable was too good and they gave it away with the $20 plan. It had to be a big step from Opus 4.8 to show progress, and Opus 4.8 is GREAT at coding in many different domains.
But they're getting killed on token cost. They have to get people paying more for tokens. So then they put Fable in the $200 plan and release Opus 5. I'm suspicious of Opus 5. It is mostly worse than 4.8. It _seems_ like they nerfed it to create more distance between it and Fable.
So what have most of us done? Stayed on Opus 4.8. The statistics bear this out. 4.8 still dominates.
Now they're stuck. If they take 4.8 away, everyone will riot. If they make Opus 5.x better than 4.8, they disincentivize everyone from moving to Fable and most importantly, paying more.
Really, all they can do is take the L for now and just let 4.8 be the apex of the $20 pro plan for the foreseeable future while they work like hell to make Fable THAT much better that it earns the $200 to $infinity that they really want everyone to pay.
Fable is just way too expensive and limited compared to GPT 5.6 Sol, and the only task that requires that level of intelligence is frontier scientific research. I use GPT/Codex primarily for coding and usually keep Claude on Sonnet 5 most of the time as I use Claude primarily to debug/brainstorm/make frontends as a supplement to GPT.
Fable is not a tool for the average user. It’s a professional tool for highly complex work.
I would compare it to a extremely high end $15k PC, or an expensive pro-grade video camera, or a freight train, or a …
I would say at least 95% of the global population will not encounter a situation once in their life where it would be actually useful/warranted.
As a small background, I have a local server and I've been trying out different models with different inference engines, quants, configurations etc... I'm also using Opus and Sol at work consistently. I've used AI since the first wave, first as a toy, then as a highly specific tool, last 6+ months as the primary LoC generator.
This is the first time I've felt, and I use the word *felt* since I don't have a suite of benchmarks or any sort of material approach towards comparing models, that Opus has declined in quality compared to before. Primarily I think its powers of deduction and understanding, even on xhigh, have become much worse. Before, being vague and providing a simple prompt would be enough, it could deduce and expand the details it needed, plus ask you clarifying questions, now this is no longer the case. A concrete, personal example, for a personal project, I've asked it to setup ssl over local IP. I didn't go into too much detail in the prompt as there are many approaches it could take and I didn't care too much to choose. It did horrible. The first thing it did was say the best lightweight approach is to add a reverse proxy. I'm like ok, makes sense. Then after asking it to proceed, it went and added a bunch of config to my golang service and didn't even setup a reverse proxy even when it said that is the way to go. It even said it didn't set it up lol. Then after I told it to do so it failed building the config in a way it was asked of it (support LAN IP and tailscale IP). Etc etc...
When Fable came out it was huge, the benchmarks told the story, and the story mostly matched the experience. It felt, again, intentionally saying felt, like it was miles ahead. Now benchmarks say that there are many models that are close, but in actual use Fable still *feels* much better. I think benchmaxxing the new open weights models is ruining the value of benchmarks, if they ever had any. When you actually put them to the test you see 500k tokens of reasoning with "Actually..." and "Wait..." in every third paragraph of their reasoning trace.
The price for Fable is definitely too much for any personal use now that it's no longer included in the subscription, and GLM 5.2, Deepseek Flash and Qwen 3.8 served locally or via cloud provide a lot, requiring a bit more babysitting though. Considering the price of Fable, my 5k USD Epyc server would pay itself off in less than a year if I used Fable or Opus in the same manner so at least for me the decision seems easy. And considering the point I'm poorly trying to make, that Opus doesn't feel like frontier anymore, this is probably the last month of my Claude subscription.
Anthropic’s issue is churn because of the peak verbosity vomit coming out of Opus 5/Mythos/Fable. What the hell did they train it on. The sane model is still Opus 4.6.
Hasn't it always been the premise that intelligence would get cheaper? To me, on the enterprise side, it seems like firms are finally getting the memo that, whether you are locked into the Ant/OAI ecosystem or not, you don't need the smartest, most expensive model to do every single task. This is a good thing for overall adoption. Whether that trickles down into regular user behavior, especially with subscription pricing, remains to be seen; even though I intellectually know I don't need Sol for a simple refactor, I am sometimes hesitant to choose Luna/Terra, as it's hard to accept using something positioned, even implicitly, as 'worse'. Remembering that the smaller models tend to be faster is what usually pushes me over the edge.
Anthropic in particular is much more compute-constrained than OpenAI and SpaceXAI and has relied on partnerships to provide inference. This reality factors into their pricing and usage limits (they started 'adjusting' the 5-hour limits during peak hours, and it certainly wasn't an upward adjustment). Accordingly, this is presumably what Anthropic wants, given they develop and release the lower-end models, suggest users use them in various nudges within their product, position the bigger/more expensive models as "For the most complex tasks" in their UIs, and so on.
Karma backed over their dogma.
I switched from Opus 4.7/4.8 to test Kimi K3 a few weeks back and the test hasn't finished; it's my daily driver now.
Given their general behavior and preference toward social engineering to scare the shit out of normal people...this seems fitting.
Every software engineer in my company uses Claude code heavily. However we’ve never enabled Fable and only use Opus, Sonnet and Haiku.
Nobody has complained and seems like for every use case we have Opus is more than powerful enough, especially with Opus 5
Yeah I mean if I run out of tokens every couple of hours and have to pause my work or shell out more money I’ll switch to other tools that don’t have this problem. Though they turned this down a bit it seems, I can work with Fable reasonably now and I enjoy it actually. I think they were just testing out how much they can raise the cost without users leaving when having the best model. I guess not much after all!
"Almost Nobody Is Using Anthropic’s Fable 5" - https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-features/almost-nobody-is-u...
I've always wondered why everyone flocks to SV's latest darling company. Have we not learned from our history of glorifying these SV darlings that turn hostile?
Reads like: brilliant Carnegie Mellon University computer science grad struggles to find job where he is not replaced by cheap, inferior Indian labor that still gets the job done, even if it takes marginally longer.
No shit we're all paying 清冲 Flash to do the grunt work. Turns out though, paying 清冲 Flash a few more cents does exactly what Ivy Wasp Pro Mythical does. Crazy how that works.
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Absolutely zero people, rounding up generously, are replacing Fable with local or Chinese models.
In my opinion, the big issue with Fable is that Claude Code cannot use it properly. I know, that sounds weird, but I've had Fable run down the wrong lane (and never stop) or give up and claim that something was impossible so many times (until I pointed at a GitHub repo that solves the "impossible" issue).
But a while ago, I had access to a Fable harness that just never gives up. And that verifies itself. It burned $100 in API tokens in 15 minutes ... but it succeeded for all the prompts where Fable + Claude had failed.
And I believe that's a real issue for Anthropic. Fable+Claude is not too expensive thanks to the subscription, but Claude severely nerfs Fable. To save money, I guess. Fable API + Custom Harness is a different class, it's so much better. But API tokens are so expensive, you're cheaper off hiring a freelancer.