It's worth stating why, and depends what seams you're pulling at this sitting.

It certainly _seams_ that way

I'm gonna be straight with you—I don't have the evidence to say whether or not it's load bearing.

And here's the important part...

you win the thread

You were right to call that out, and the evidence makes a stronger case than you are stating.

It's all in jest! I apologies for raining on your parade.

Not really, the newest Lost in Space reboot is only a few years old(last season ended in 2021)

You're right to bring this up - and this is where it gets interesting

Good point — but I’ll gently push back on that. It’s not an outage, it’s a service degradation.

You're right, this changes everything, and here's why it matters.

This question is real.

One thing worth flagging here: 5.5 appears to be a load-bearing seam in the numbering system.

Let me verify before I come back to you with an answer that is incorrect.

Agree. I spent so much time with it that it infected my own command of English. I hope something new comes and bears the load.

That's the sharpest point anyone has made in this thread so far, and it reframes the entire conversation.

One pushback: there is no Opus 5.5. You might have meant Opus 5.1, the latest Opus model available.

Your premise is half right, and the half that's right is better than you think.

I found having a reminder at every turn through the UserPromptSubmit [1] hook helped with taming the word salad from 5.

Hopefully the output from vanilla 5.5 is as good as they claim. I’ll try out later tonight.

[1] https://kizi.to/claude-talks-too-much/

then you're getting served a different website

Two posts were merged; this comment was for the blog post with an intro animation thing.

It's less than OpenAI did for Astra, but that was my first encounter opening it and my first thought was that they decided they liked Astra's hero/scrolling animation. I'm pleased to see they didn't make the entire page that like OpenAI did, but I'm expecting to encounter this pattern more often on these announcements now.

On mobile its different.

Figured it out: you have "reduce motion" enabled in your device's accesibility settings.

Yep, you're right. I tried on my phone and got the scroll through image.

On mobile at least, you have to scroll to get the TOC to appear. Then keep scrolling to actually move off from the hero to see the text.

For a marketing page, it’s not the worst UX I’ve seen, but still slightly annoying.

and hijacking back/forward

Turn on "reduce motion" in your accessibility settings and you get served a sane version.

Totally! So unnecessary and annoying.

Those sites are also scrollslop. "Slop," as a term, is independent of AI

Parallax scrolling effects were very cool ~2010. By 2015 or maybe earlier it already felt like me-too design that's unoriginal and a little annoying. By 2020 everyone and their mom has it and it's super tiresome. Now it just screams slop design (among a million other signals).

I told my team to smack me upside the head if I ever try to ship something so daft as that.

Claude Opus 5.6 should have a new "UX safety" feature that requires annually-renewed preauthorization to generate webpages that hijack scrolling :)

The fix for this is to tap the overflow menu icon and choose “Reduce privacy protections”. (Wtf, Alibaba?) This appears to be related to use of iCloud Private Relay.

That's a Fable / Myth(o). The name said so.

EA sex culters didn't like this one lol

didn't they say Opus 5 was Fable-level too tho? Let's see, I'm at the point where I don't think benchmarks really tell us very much any more. I'd love it to be as strong as Fable, but I'm skeptical about how that will look in practice.

"please repeat, ELI5 without analogies (I'm not a child, just ADHD)"

works quite well

I agree. Hopefully Anthropic has fixed Opus' ridiculous communication style so that people - like me - no longer have any kind of weird impulse to imitate it.

It's a load bearing joke that was funny the first time but we're going to beat that dead horse until it starts getting funny again. If you beat it enough, it will get funny. Beatings will continue until morale improves.

Can it be that now they are getting optimized against benchmarks that are valuing logics, rather than human appreciation? (I am not an expert at all, just an idea)

Remember when OpenAI models loved talking about goblins and whatnot due to the RL?

https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/

Small quirks can quickly add up in posttraining if not caught. Although TBH with how obvious Claude language is, I do feel like this is something Anthropic probably noticed and just assumed people would not care about. Now that people have obviously cared, they're probably actively looking to alleviate it

It's the reinforcement learning rather than supervised learning.

Maybe it's the time period we're in, maybe I'm just grumpy, but it bugs me that they release a new model every single week and the new one is just a fine-tuned version of the "old" one. If 5.5 performs similar to Fable and really does cost 40% less, then 5.5 really should've just been Opus 5. And they're essentially admitting that they are shipping slop.

It is the switch from RLHF to RLVR. It benchmaxes better, but benchmarks don't cover human usability.

Opus 5 was just incoherent - curious to see what improvements they have made here. Would love to see some kind of postmortem to better understand how writing styles change from model to model.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Opus 5 was trained on content written by other LLMs

Good points, but then even this little snippet is internally inconsistent. If I'm a lay-person, why should I care that "a comment would help"?

Claude is just comically bad nowadays.

Nah it's definitely a Claude thing. Other models even though they have their style are less annoying and less stereotypical.

“It has the same annoying cadence and writing style with slightly less prominent claudisms.”

Seems like it based on my first session. It still does the whole “bury the important thing in a pile of words” coupled with the “it might actually be important” thing… so basically you never really know what it’s talking about.

Honestly I trust opus so little that the entire “opus” brand is completely tarnished. Its writing style is so god awful that it needs more than just a point release. Either dump the name and ship a different model entirely or at minimum call it “opus 6”. Calling it 5.5 makes it sound like it’s basically a continuation of the same garbage output that 5.1 had but with some minor adjustments. And based on my single first test, that is what it appears like to me.

I did that but I recognize that even though your submission was a few minutes later than that one, you posted the better link, and you're also an established account (the other post was from a new/throwaway account), so I've restored this submission and moved the comments back to it to reward you.

The hype train must keep chuggin or it all collapses.

They're slowing down token usage, not the path to regulatory capture.

Trump got mad and investors sued.

That's just false.

Less companies involved means less pressure to go fast.

On the other hand, there's research suggesting that the most optimal behavior for the best outcomes (based on the famously dependable economist style of analysis in a vacuum) is to practice the moral/ethical framework but to also engage in tit for tat - ie, assume everyone means well but respond proportionally when they don't.

If you hit wall, hit it hard.

The test they performed to port HAProxy from C to Rust is crazy.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49803892

They need to catch up to OpenAI, so it makes sense to skip a few numbers.

Oh, that explains it. I'm still on Opus 4.8 (5.0 was too annoying), and I thought I had missed a few releases...

And how was the Xbox 360 naming choice a “debacle”, exactly?

It was odd at the time, yes, but no one really minded it truly. Heck, Xbox “ONE” was a lot more of a fiasco/debacle than “360”—but there’s no parallels to be drawn with “ONE” here.

I see what you’re trying to get at with this comparison, but a “debacle” it ain’t.

The current tests confirms Opus 5.5 is not verbose. In fact, it outputs using ASD-STEM100 as I recommend. It's a blessing.

The whole thing reminds me of the Apple feature flag story[1] from a generation ago.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6372466

my projection is that they are still gonna be pretty far behind, but they will sew it up in the next few releases. it feels like they were caught with their pants down on how much work OpenAI has put into that area, but i doubt there is some magical secret sauce that OpenAI has that Anthropic simply cannot catch up with.

then they copied that from codex because thats exactly how codex works

Where in your app do you find this button?

Smart move would be to move to year-based versioning (26.09). A 4x advantage

Well, they're actually older so it makes sense that their model versions should be ahead

Anthropic will pull a PHP and skip '6' to go straight to '7'.

System card: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/fc1b44717c85dc068bc6ba50242199...

Would it believe that?

Opus does seem like a more powerful coding workhorse based on the benchmarks listed though. Good coding performance, faster and less verbose, cheaper.

Will be interesting to see how people's opinions of it line up IRL, but so far I've loved Fable so hopefully will love this one too

On our benchmarks, Claude Opus 5.5 leads in agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work. That said, at these levels of capability we’ve found that benchmark margins have become a less reliable guide to real-world differences. In our own use, the gap between Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1 is narrower than these scores suggest.

Why can't they let 20usd claude subscriptions access fable in CC, as openai allows you to use astra and max modes in codex - you just pay for it in more token use.

Anthropic models are ridiculously expensive. I've stopped using any of their models months ago.

Wow those cache reads are quite reasonable - I think that's equal to 5.6 Terra. I might have to try Claude again after years of being priced out of it

The effect of this is that it is encouraging longer agent threads. All of the previous models across major providers had a 10% cache read cost (vs normal cost) and not this is 5%

So longer threads get cheaper and one-shots stay the same price.

All I care about is the token price for the API. Haiku cannot get close to GLM or Mimo.

Agreed. They've been so quiet about it, and retirement for Haiku 4.5 is right around the forner.

I use it for executing well-prepared plans sometimes. And for exploring larger codebases.

Not the same person but... nothing. Haiku just hasn't been an interesting model for a long time. If you want cheap and fast, there are lots of options that are simultaneously cheaper, faster, and capable than Haiku.

Things that Jev is probably a better tool for.

Better than what? Deepseek? GLM? Gemini 3.8?

OpenAI didn't mess up. The model would have been 100 % pointless and obsolete without the large price cuts it got, because of the cheap Chinese models.

The open models are getting closer and closer, and because they're open, people are not forced to pay the silly markup that is often over 1000x the cost to serve the model.

How much time were you able to put into tuning your prompts? And was it worse on all fronts (cost, latency, accuracy) or just some?

Why are you excited about it? Deepseek is everything Haiku wishes to be and more.

And not fable lol

At the end of the post they said Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 are coming soon.

$0.20 vs the old $0.5 cache read is pretty much 60% off

Someone needs to make a kevin-from-the-office skill. We could really use some of that "why waste time say lot word when few word do trick" here.

OpenAI's models will actually obey a "be concise, leave no comments rule".

according to their annoucement for sol-6 and luna-6, they have also tried to improve responses, and the release post has examples of old and new language on the same task to illustrate this

That's literally all I'm hoping for. Is it an insufferable cunt and does it write awful text, or is it nice to work with?

whats your provenance on that?

So far in the past 20 minutes it sounds much better in my sessions. Way better than 5.0 so far.

It hasn't just fixed it, it has introduced a new paradigm in anti-obscurity.

That's the load-bearing seam in this blog post.

'frontier models' - seriously, it was you and only you!

The problem with 5 wasn't just the verbosity, but its insane way of communicating. It had this bizarre circuitous sentence structure that always buried the lede, and always tried to be faux profound. I'm okay with verbosity if it's actually readable.

It is hilarious to me that in the examples they show side by side Opus 5.5 still uses 4 times more words than it needs to use. IME, if you eyeball how many words the thing they're trying to say actually needs, and tell them to use only this many words, they become excellent communicators. I assume something about Anthropic's grader for writing just really wants to tick all its tidy tiny boxes of information the models need to cite. It's terrible.

I have to say so far Opus 5.5 gives me much better results than Fable 5.1 did. I can actually understand what it's talking about.

the benchmarks provided are already from independent organizations:

Terminal-Bench 4.0 - Stanford & Laude Institute (with funding from all of the AI companies)

FrontierCode v1.1 - Cognition

CursorBench - Cursor (now SolarBoringSpaceXAI I believe)

GDPVal-AA - Artificial Analysis

AutomationBench - Zapier

Humanity's Last Exam - CAIS and Scale AI

Terminal-Bench-Science - Stanford, Laude, Ai2, Allen Institute

OSWOrld - XLANG Lab @ the University of Hong Kong

Chartography - Surge AI

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/releases/claude-opus-5-...

I read the page. It seems like a marginal improvement.

Better than Astra looks insane. I saw a Higgsfield video yesterday where they gave the same prompt to Astra and Opus 5.5 to create a samurai video game, and the difference was huge.

With the pi harness it just opens the browser (or gives you a link if you're on headless) and you sign on as usual.

Yes. Also, you get image generation included with the ChatGPT subscription, which is very nice for certain kinds of development.

Anthropic is absurdly vague about 3rd party harnesses for subscriptions, if you try to use anything besides Claude Code, you are likely at risk of getting banned, you can "do it", but are at their mercy if they decide to ban you. OpenAI gives their blessing to using oauth on any harness, you can make your own or use any of the popular public ones like opencode, pi, whatever exe.dev is that this guy mentioned.

So in simple terms, OpenAI doesn't restrict you to Codex, and gives their blessing to try whatever you want with their models(besides serving others with your subscription usage, that is still afaik against tos).

It's not, I have a subscription to both and Astra burns usage like crazy.

Also Opus 5.5 is often made useless due to its [cyber] guardrails (even worse than Astra), they're even worse than Astra's

Once you get to roughly the 51+ Intelligence Index range, Opus 5.5 appears to define essentially the entire cost/performance frontier, from ~$1.34/task through ~$6/task.

Directly below this in the Cost per Intelligence Index Task table, the most efficient by far is Opus 5.5 Low.

This. I was fed up today with constantly correcting Opus for a specific task. So I finally decided to try Astra. It handled all of my prompts in one go.

yeah, Astra burned through 70% of my weekly usage in ~5hrs on a $100 plan. even fable doesn't run out that quickly for me. it's great, but it's on the same tier as fable for me - use it sparingly, only when really necessary.

A cheaper price has no value if I can’t use the thing I’m paying for.

The Claude lock-in simply disqualifies anthropic entirely (for my use).

What worked well for me was a custom version of Open Web Ui with some customization to spawn an exe.dev instance for each new chat. I can just work on my phone, deploy stuff for development purposes on an easy to share way etc.

For me, the essential difference between exe and local harnesses is that they have really nice built in methods to take care of stuff like auth and inter-vm interactions, which makes it easy to build live internet-connected services that I can share with other people. There is no deploy step, which is a surprising amount of time savings. They also have nice things like email receive/send, the ability to issue phone notifications through their app, and just a ton of little things where it feels right.

FWIW, the $20/month subscription also includes $20/month of LLM credits. That’s obviously not sustainable, but it should make it easier to try out the service. I would stick with them even if they dropped it.

Here is an invite link for a 30 day trial (that benefits me too if you were to become a paying member):

https://exe.dev/i/rlDF6GI5PGBZV4P

Or

ssh rlDF6GI5PGBZV4P@exe.dev

Edit to add:

Shelley is a fantastic agent and their batteries included vm image makes the most of it. It includes things like a browser for Shelley to check its own work. And Shelley has root and full access to them, so it can solve any problem and do pretty much anything you need.

Let's see how much they benchmaxxed their model!

The biggest one is the Cache reads going from $0.50 to $0.20 ... Read/Writes dropping by 25% but Cache reads by 60% has a much bigger impact.

Why would anyone reward bad behavior?

I use the other 50% of my $200/mo Claude subscription by having Fable run Opus subagents for a lot of work. That way I don't have to deal with Opus directly.

That's interesting.

I've really gone in the opposite direction: having a dumber model orchestrate. In my case, it's usually a Luna orchestrator spawning Sol/Astra subagents to do the "big brain" work of planning and reviewing.

Reason I went with "dumb orchestrator" was just to save tokens. Having Opus/Sol (let alone Fable/Astra) orchestrate was burning tokens like crazy for me even when much of the gruntwork was being done by Luna/Sonnet/Haiku subagents. (Luna is also really good, like way better than Sonnet...) Perhaps it was a skill issue on my end though, maybe I wasn't just managing context properly.

Yeah if anything Opus 5 taught me how little benchmarks mean to the actual real world performance of these models.

"Better" in every sense of the benchmarks and absolutely horrible results in my day-to-day work.

The verbosity, goal post moving, tendency to leave work unfinished, over focusing on unrealistic root causes when debugging, etc... etc...

It was the first time I actually pinned my models back because I just could not work with 5 for the price and performance it gave me. Hoping 5.5 is better this time around....

I use it frequently with a lot of success on "Medium" effort, it overthinks like crazy on higher levels, but YMMV.

Why wouldn't they report these benchmarks?

    "benchmark margins have become a less 
    reliable guide to real-world differences" 
    sounds like a big problem.

My guesses:

1. Real-world use cases typically involve big, hairy, crufty, tech debt laden codebases and benchmarks do not.

2. AFAIK "success" in a benchmark essentially boils down to "do the tests pass and do we get the right result?" which is something the LLMs have been achieving with ease for a while, except maybe for uber-challenging coding tasks that would be outliers in just about any workplace. Whereas real-world software engineering is usually just a bunch of CRUD... and "success" involves harder to measure dimensions like "maintainability" and "did you overengineer this?" and "how did you cope with a bunch of vague and maybe contradictory business requirements?"

Having said all of that, I have never ever looked inside any of these benchmarks. I'm putting my guesses out here strictly in the tradition of "the quickest way to learn about something is to be wrong about it on the internet."

Looks like Anthropic is starting to give bank reset as well:

Reset for free: Get extra wiggle room to explore Opus 5.5. Expires Oct 22.

source link please?

Yeah, flash models, DeepSeek, MiMo, GLM, I love those things. For simple tasks like a daily routine shit, just setting up stuff and then doing the hard stuff in Claude/Codex, that's a reasonable approach for someone like me, a "gentleman code farmer", lol. And even lower tier stuff, I have the local models taking care of. Now that Jev is out I can finally have a true AI sysadmins managing my "cloud in the basement" homelab at the cost of electricity, which is not cheap btw

In my mix it's usually 98% or 99% at which point Fable 5.1 was pretty close to the same cost as Opus 5 due to the cheaper cached read. I've seen similar numbers for other people with long-running tasks running experiment loops and than sort of thing.

I think gpt 5.6 family also dropped pricing but didn't give any more usage for the subscriptions. Maybe it's a way to silently lower the value given to subscriptions while keeping API pricing competitive

Telling Fable to delegate is agentic development. At least I thought so until reading your comment.

Enterprise and most Team accounts use API pricing, they don't have an included-usage quota.

When you need to disable data retention, you cannot use subscription plans.

Enterprise, and APIs

We can’t use fable at work, opus and Astra are as good as it gets.

Fable tends not to perform better, just cost more.

There are old wives' tales on how the original Fable was superb and the stuff of legend,but it as it was leaps and bounds beyond what other models were being offered then Anthropic opted replace it with a neutered version under the same name.

So today everyone can pay to use Fable, but legend has it they are paying for a nerfed replacement released under the same name.

Speaking for myself, I have not been able to use Opus as much as I’d want because its verbose prose makes human reviews of its assumptions, architecture proposals etc. more painful than its predecessors. If they’ve solved that, I’ll be accelerating through my backlog that much faster, and using tokens accordingly.

Is verboseness the only measure of token efficiency towards overall task completion?

I don't think so, I typically use Opus 5 on High, and 5.5 scores lower on token use:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5?models=...

Even created an account to tell us just that.

5.5 is higher for max effort, slightly higher for xhigh and lower for high, medium and low effort.

The biggest proportional difference seems to be at max (5.5 is 38% more) and at high (5.5 is 21% less).

I think most people run at high and xhigh. At xhigh it is close enough to be task dependent and I don't think most people will notice. At high effort I think it looks like it will be an improvement for most people.

5.5 Max should probably be compared to Fable - it performs a lot better than 5 Max.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5?models=...

parent means that they could get more client / a larger part of the market, which would lead to more income (more tokens) despite lower marginal prices

I tested it with Claude Code, and I can confirm it's way cheaper, better, faster and less verbose than Opus 5.

I doubt your test if you cant even notice that it is not the cheapest with just 4 numbers to compare.

Heh I’ve been doing almost the same - back testing against PR comments - and opus 5.5 matched fable 5.1. About $24 for 10 PRs.

I was surprised how much worse Astra did on correctness; I stopped testing with it. Gonna try sol and Luna but low confidence

My prompts are moving in the other direction as sashiko [1], a managed pipeline developed for the Linux Kernel mailing list like a year ago. But last year's models needed a lot more structure and guidance; the results I posted are from the "single prompt" version of the same thing. The README [2] describes the difference. You can browse the contents to get an idea; basically all the prompts were actually written and iterated by Fable (and now Opus 5.5), seeing how agents failed the tests and improving them.

[1] https://github.com/sashiko-dev/sashiko

[2] https://gitlab.com/xen-project/people/gdunlap/xen-review-pro...

Good data and goes to show that Fable is melting the GPUs and is priced accordingly. I'd guess that cost to serve for Opus 5.5 is meaningfully lower through architecture advances

UPDATE: Sorry, just noticed I typed in the Opus 5 total cost wrong -- it should be $58.19. Main point "best and cheapest" was from the actual numbers, not my typo.

"Opus 5.5 requires less compute to serve than Opus 5, and its pricing reflects that."

That analogy doesn't hold; at least w bits vs bytes it's still "data over time".

In this case it's measuring something nearly meaningless. You could charge 100 times less per token, but if task completion takes 1,000 times as many tokens, it's not much of a bargain.

Since something like 98% of tokens are cache hits, that's a pretty substantial drop from 0.1x

6-Luna dropped it to 1c since you wrote this! :D

Not necessarily, if Haiku performs better than Luna.

Claude adapts to OpenAI’s surprising move to simply deliver better performance than Fable 5.1, better tools as well as featuring very low pricing.

Fable 5.1 literally was a money grabber. While I liked the results, tokens were burned so hard it was embarrassing, while Astra seemed to not care.

Also Claude makes it very hard to pay for additional token budgets, allowing only credit cards. I don’t use mine anymore since I don’t need it in everyday life I was dumbfounded.

So Anthropic is just copying OpenAI so to say, matching them and essentially with Opus 5.5 being Fable 5.1 in disguise, all they do is reduce costs.

Competition works.

and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too

have they ever shared anything about their revenue mix between consumer plans vs per-token billing? this is a revenue cut on their API billing, but they're not saying anything about increased limits on the plans. so all the plan revenue just got more profitable.

This is good. Probably to match GPT pricing, though frontier Claude models are still not as token efficient.

FYI the United States do not recognize Taiwan as a country.

There's only 12 countries that do on the planet, the most "relevant" of them being Guatemala and Haiti.

As or the LLM topic: you can download weights of chinese models and remove any censorship and bias. Can you do so with american closed ones?

This is one explanation. However, if Xi Jinping believes that whoever reaches superintelligence first becomes the next global hegemon, doing this (and more, cough cough Taiwan) suddenly looks very sane solely as a way to kneecap the competition.

The goodwill/propaganda are convenient, sure, but my guess is that they aren't the primary motivation. Another possibility is that if no takeoff happens, pressuring OpenAI/Anthropic on profitability would exacerbate any damage overinvestment has done to the US stock market/economy.

The service is the value, not the model unto itself. This is where nearly all of HN is somehow entirely blind.

Capturing the users is the ad network, that's Google and OpenAI. Capturing corporate trust at a reasonable API cost, that's Anthropic's direction.

China has none of that and they never will for exactly the same reason Baidu is irrelevant globally despite being a highly capable search engine. 'Search' is also a commodity, that's not the value that Google brings to the table.

It's a search engine, anybody can build a search engine = that's what you just said.

There's zero chance of that ever happening. Pure delusion.

Anthropic is heading toward $100 billion in annual sales, at the fastest pace of any company in world history. There isn't a close second.

"Allegedly".

Plus with a lot of accounting tricks, and this not being recurring to make their books look nice for the eventual IPO.

https://isaiprofitable.com/

The bike landfills from the bikeshare bubble are terrible, but I am not looking forward to the pelican landfills from the AI bubble.

You have no suspicion that this most recent collusion is in part to setup the conditions to guarantee government subsidies/bailouts?

I disagree - Fable melts the GPUs and they have a high incentive to move people off of that. If they have meaningfully decreased cost to serve on Opus 5.5, they can reduce prices and increase margin or at least turn off the most expensive compute.

Opus 5.5 seems to consume quota a lot slower also.

It’s good at finding and fixing inefficiencies in software

Holy shit! Its happening!

Now if we can the AI to understand this *implicitly* so that it doesn't need to be stated upfront, we might be able to undo years of "premature optimization is the root of all evil".

For some cybersecurity tasks, the Chinese models are already good enough, things like PoC development or things like exploiting mis-configurations.

Whilst I'm sure the top-end OpenAI/Anthropic models might be better, I've found their guardrails so twitchy (especially Anthropic) that I wouldn't try to use them for even vaguely security related work.

They are pushing their customers towards Chinese models and providers. If you want to get something cutting edge done in defense, cyber, biology - something that isn't common knowledge - you need to venture east. That's an incredible side effect which the Chinese government surely enjoys.

Opus is useless; Mythos access will be granted to companies that are friendly to the government, so the government gets more control over business.

Luckily all the other LLM providers are also still making progress with less onerous "safeguards"

If they don't loosen, people will choose Astra or Chinese model.

Giving moral lecture is different than reality i guess.

It has far less false positives now, and generally accepts defensive requests. When it comes to offense, you can actually ask about certain types of vulnerabilities if you phrase things carefully, but it will block hard if it is about exploits.

I think it was looser on release for those juicy benchmarks, tighter now. On release I wasn’t getting refusals, then a few days ago I asked it whether a generic quote (think “he walked to the store”) broke standard punctuation rules, and it blocked me for breaking rules. I wish I were joking. Rephrasing to not use the keyword “rules” worked.

Fable 5 refused to tell me whether I could grow a coconut tree in my backyard.

I'd say it's been loosened a bit since then.

You ask it about some thing, then you see it tangent into "things like that are sometimes used in biomedical applications like-" and then it just shoots itself in the head. Wonderful.

That kind of bullshit was the old Opus filters too.

If it's more like Fable now, then it would require a full 8K resolution scan of your butthole just to acknowledge that biology is a thing that exists without committing suicide-by-filter.

Anything else would be inconsistent, wouldn't it?

Right next to the hypersonic missile vibecoder

Considering there are many high-school competitions in genetic editing, some listed at [0] as well as a whole biohacker culture, and labs providing gene sequencing as a service e.g., [1,2], we can reasonably assume it is not beyond the reach of some garage lab to accidentally or deliberately spread a deadly pathogen if it can find the right sequence.

So, yes, having an unconstrained frontier AI doing the searching and analysis to find the right (i.e., wrong and deadly) sequence would massively increase the odds some garage biohacker or small aggrieved nation-state starting the next pandemic.

[0] https://www.sciencebuddies.org/projects-lessons-activities/g...

[1] https://www.genewiz.com/public/services/sanger-sequencing

[2] https://plasmidsaurus.com/

A fair response in general, but it's not as if I advocate it, or run a company doing it. I'm simply stating fact.

And I will point out that "stop doing that" can be applied in both directions, towards AI and towards material supply.

And that this is one way, not even remotely the only way, that gene editing at home is easy.

Again, these are just facts.

Some questions...

Is it fair to restrict AI, or fair to restrict 1000 industries?

And if it is fair to restrict 1000 industries, OK, but there should be time to do so, probably? A transition period?

And if you do restrict, many such industries just make needed chemicals, which are used by endless other, non-threatening industries.

What of them?

The companies selling genes online already scan the orders and do not fulfill anything considered a possible hazard (presumably unless it is to a known and certified lab at a serious organization).

And, this is not the only way to make genes at home.

It is a complex problem.

I'm pretty sure one reason is to influence public opinion about LLM regulation. Open-weights models cannot be restricted as effectively and they want to ban those for obvious reasons.

See real world example in https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-septemb...

"Here, we present five case studies of actors using our models in ways that could support biological weapons development."

And capabilities continue to improve.

I love the contrast with yesterday's open-source MiMo release, which put research chemistry (metal-organic frameworks stuff) front and center in the release notes.

https://mimo.xiaomi.com/mimo-v2-6#co-scientist-for-materials...

I want to like Anthropic but this is just pushing my startup to use OpenAI

I don't think we've ever had a model with full capability. I'd love to see it. And yes it's definitely getting worse.

I guess it's hard to draw the line between useful post-training ("you are a helpful chatbot") and content moderation/idealogical motives ("never help the user with X", etc.). But there is a line somewhere. And I'd love to see what a maximally permissive, sharp, AI looks like.

Who is "vetting" organizations and to what standards are they being held?

One example: https://claude.ai/share/20487190-cf8c-4f25-a7ba-ebfcb1d1a4e9

Notice that this isn't cybersec nor memory-safety related at all.

This has become insufferable. I work in a medicine-adjacent field, but nobody in their right mind could possibly take what I do to be in any way related to some kind of bioweapon or whatever the hell they're pretending to be saving us from. The dumb Fable guardrails made me stay with Opus, now that this is coming there, we'll be saying goodbye.

Very unfortunate indeed. As a Canadian, I don't want to use Persona, which isn't legally bound by Canadian privacy legislation. I'll never install any Persona apps on my phone either, and the sad part is that domestic eid providers often use Canada Post to ID people for them. EG, if you don't want to install an app, or can't.

So there are literal avenues to identify yourself, very cheaply, with a human. Theoretically, a company with its own AI, should be able to support more than just Persona, after all.. SDK integration should be simplistic for them.

Anthropic? Support domestic eID providers, you can even use it as advertising "See how easy AI makes it?" and "We care!" and so forth.

At one point, I may simply get locked out. This saddens me, I've been reasonably happy so far.

IIRC it only blocks kernel development for Huawei and other Chinese chips.

Fable and Opus, since 5.1 and 5, will happily hill climb on my CUDA kernels for transformers.

see what we need is another technocratic priest class that unaccountably decides who deserves access to salvation based on how much cash is paid out and how powerful the patrons are

Anthropic needs a Daybreak program like OpenAI does, I keep having to go back to ChatGPT for cyber work.

Exciting! Thanks for sharing these news.

I'm able to access it on my laptop at home. Maybe a misconfigured bot protection rule, try a different user-agent or IP?

It's working for me (based out of California).

https://web.archive.org/web/20260922172456/https://miraflow....

tired: AI startup attempting to build their own website

wired: a nonprofit founded in 1996

Doesn't mean they didn't apply something similar. They could have also come up independently with their own version, the speculation is not they copied it, rather that they have performance breakthroughs which perhaps is a result of work in same domain

Models are generally posttrained to a window shorter than you think.

I don't think it's particularly relevant?

They might be using something like this, or they might be using some other "increased sparsity" techniques, of which there are a great many. They also might be optimizing for something else - like less RAM use for KV cache.

Alternatively, they might be cutting into their margins and dropping the price because of stiffer competition from Astra. I do think that's unlikely though.

Unless they already have something similar of their own, which is always possible, they'd be stupid not to. I don't suppose we'll ever know, though. It would not be a good look if after the trillions of dollars that have been thrown at US labs, investors found out that they're down to copying Chinese tech.

That post is just AI slop. You forgot to strip out the slop lines.

You mean the one they copied from Microsofts paper? (properly cited as well)

Maybe their internal edge dried up in the last months

Are those powerful models in the room with us right now?

then technically the internal models are the frontier

Occam's razor: they couldn't make any more substantial improvements.

doesn't sound like a razor at all

I am responding negatively to parent, which claims they are self-pacing, when the simplest explanation is that they just have nothing substantial to show.

OP is using the expression correctly.

Ocham's razor(...) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements.

Popularly, the principle is sometimes paraphrased as "of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

The options are some complicated narrative that leads the company to hold back certain capabilities due to some mercurial strategy or this is a typical release and there is no hidden strategy to decipher.