# Fable is Back: Here's What You Should Try First — Transcript (2026-07-01)

https://aidailybrief.ai/e/2026-07-01 · Listen: https://pod.link/1680633614

---

[00:00:00] Today Today on the AI Daily Brief Fable 5 is officially coming back. Before that in the headlines

The quest to cut inference costs. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Robots and Pencils, Blitzy, and Airtable. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts

And if you wanna learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors@aidailybrief.ai.

Welcome back We kick off today with a story that is very of the zeitgeist that we are living in right now. OpenAI has found a way to slash their inference costs in half, sort of. This headline from The Information grabbed a lot of attention, and understandably so



everyone right now is looking for new approaches to token efficiency

and the implications of these [00:01:00] searches have huge impacts on the business models and the companies that are shaping AI and the larger market, structures they're operating in Now, when it Now, when it comes to this article specifically, the details do suggest that it might be a smaller breakthrough than it appears at first.

The claim is that OpenAI researchers have discovered a new optimization technique that cut their inference requirements in half for existing models. When the When the technique was applied to ChatGPT users who weren't signed into the service, OpenAI was able to serve that entire user base segment on just a hundred GPUs

The OpenAI source didn't disclose what the technique was. the information speculated it could be quantization, cache optimization, batching queries, or routing queries to a lower power model Notably, none of those techniques would improve service for OpenAI larger models without compromises.

The universal truth that there is no free lunch remains and most attempts at optimizing inference come at the expense of model quality.

now there's also now there's also the question of what it means that OpenAI is testing this technique on a tiny batch of their least engaged users. That might be a totally reasonable starting [00:02:00] point, just the first test of many. Or it could be a cautionary approach that implies that there's some risk of quality degradation

The TLDR is that while there seems to be something interesting here, we probably shouldn't treat it like some sort of silver bullet to resolve the compute crunch

Still, the information Stefanie Palazzolo is convinced that OpenAI is onto something. In an accompanying video, she said, " "This is This is a very important secret sauce for them that they don't even want to tell other OpenAI employees about, because if these things leak, it can quickly be picked up by other labs, which can also then use that to lower their costs.

This is something they're holding very close to their chests."

Now, many pointed to a new research paper from DeepSeek

which open sources a speculative decoder system called dSpark that can speed up inference by 85% during testing on small models. Now, it's unclear how dSpark impacts costs But it is a reminder that inference optimization is not even close to a solved problem, meaning that theoretically huge gains from some novel technique are definitely plausible And of course, even if OpenAI hasn't found a way to boost efficiency by [00:03:00] 50% across the board Any sort of gains here could still be a very big deal.

OpenAI's army of free users are a significant drag on profitability, so anything they can do to cut inference costs to that user base could really move the needle



and given the particular audience

certain types of quality reductions may be more tolerable

Everett Randall of Benchmark Ventures has been talking about a phenomenon he's calling the AI mom test. He recently said, " There's nothing my mom actually asks of her AI products that needs to be done by the frontier or even a near frontier model."

And it seems to be, at least initially, like that could bethe group that this new technique addresses

Certainly there is a lot of chatter out there About innovations and new approaches in this area. aggregator Andrew Curran tweeted, " "I'm I'm posting this prediction now so I can quote it later. There has been a significant breakthrough in architecture, specifically around memory efficiency, not by one of the big labs, but by a team that was spun out of OpenAI.

They will probably announce it soon."



now in addition to labs finding new approaches, companies themselves are also finding new, more efficient [00:04:00] architectures.

20 Minute VC's Harry Stebbings tweeted, " In the last 24 hours, I have had five founders message me of varying sized companies, some 10-person startups and one $200 billion public company

All of them stated they have been able to cut inference spend by seventy-five percent or more with little effort, no performance change, and better latency. The times they are a-changing

Now, Now, speaking of innovations in this new token efficiency era, vibe coding platform Base44 has launched their own AI model in an attempt to shore up the business. The model is called Base1 and follows the same playbook as Cursor's Composer. Namely, Base44 has taken an open source base model and applied their own fine-tuning using training data from hundreds of millions of user interactions on their platform.

Mayor Shlomo laid out the strategic thinking in a few different ways

Firstly, Base44 is making the bet that narrowly trained models can be competitive with the frontier. this bet appears to be paying off for Cursor, with most viewing Composer 2.5 as good enough for common tasks. Writes Shlomo, " General models need to be good at everything.

They need to understand many programming languages, many workflows, many domains, and [00:05:00] many kinds of reasoning."

However, Base44 only needs their model to be good at building web apps

Now, of course, Base44 also views the model as a cost control measure. Shlomo wrote, " It gives us more control over cost, latency, reliability, and quality while still letting us use the best external models where they are the right fit."



Finally, he writes, "The model gives Base44 a way to utilize platform data to improve the product. The idea is similar to the harness model pairing that OpenAI and Anthropic have pursued with their own coding platforms. Base44 believes they can develop the model and harness in tandem to deliver strong 

platform-specific results

As AI becomes a bigger part of how software is created, writes Shlomo, owning more of that intelligence becomes just as important as owning the infrastructure around it

it Now, speaking of strategic convergence, AWS is launching a new division to join the AI deployment race. AWS AWS announced that they will invest a billion dollars to create a new unit staffed with forward deployed engineers to help customers set up and use AI tools.

Now, this follows, of course, OpenAI and Anthropic both launching private equity partnerships to house their FTE [00:06:00] divisions

With Google in May expanding their existing FTE division and Microsoft announcing an FTE partnership with EY in June



of AWS's Frontier AI Engineering and Services

said that the company has been upskilling salespeople to be FTEs, giving them the title of solution architects. Vasquez said the effort is an expansion of AWS's Generative AI Center, which was first announced in 2023. She added that AWS will focus on industries with the strongest demand, including healthcare, government, and financial services Reinforcing the themes of the moment, Vasquez also noted that the big shift towards AI budget optimization rather than just the deployment of AI capabilities.

She said, " Open source and the use of open weight models is definitely gaining traction for customers for a variety of different reasons. Price performance, but also they service the task."



in another in another indication of just how significant this trend is, the AI Engineer World's Fair, which is happening this week in San Francisco

is actually hosting an AIFTE mini conference within the event

Now, following up on the Claude Tag story from last week, Anthropic seems to be [00:07:00] preparing to bring agents to Microsoft Teams as well. The Information reports that Anthropic recently told Microsoft that they plan to bring a version of Claude Tag to Microsoft's Slack equivalent, Teams

Claude Tag, Claude Tag, you might remember, allows users to summon Claude into a channel to receive tasks or take instruction. Unlike previous Claude integrations, Claude Tag isn't tied to any particular user. Instead, it functions as an organization-centric agent with persistent memory and tool access independent of the user.

In in fact, it's actually not calling Claude exactly. it's calling the full suite that comprises Claude Code

Now, one Now, one interesting sub-story behind all of this is what it says about the relationship between Anthropic and these platforms, both Slack and in the future Microsoft

There has been some scuttlebutt that behind the scenes some Salesforce employees were concerned about Anthropic being allowed into the ecosystem on such a fundamental level

Although I don't think that that was universal given the amount of PR that I got from Salesforce about this integration

But still, introducing Claude Tag to Microsoft does add another level to this power struggle

Currently, Currently, both [00:08:00] Salesforce and Microsoft allow third-party agents to access their ecosystems free of charge. in fact, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella went one better during an investor call in April. He claimed that Claude helped reinforce Microsoft's ecosystem, commenting, " It's fascinating that here we are in 2026, and the most exciting things in AI are plug-ins in Word or Excel.

When you see that, that means we have a structural position in knowledge work."



that said, will the tune change, as Claude gets more endemic across the knowledge work spectrum? It's certainly something interesting to keep an eye on

Lastly today

One of the things that we've been talking about when it comes to the data center build-out



is the opportunity for the data center builders and operators to If I might be allowed to put it crassly for a moment

buy off the communities that they're operating in



or perhaps a better way to think about it is to is to cut them into the benefits that the data centers might represent. One example One example of someone starting to nudge down that path comes from SpaceX. The company is discounting Starlink subscriptions in Memphis in an attempt to quell backlash.

SpaceX's Colossus data centers are [00:09:00] located just south of Memphis and have been the subject of significant local controversy. The The campus operates on 46 gas turbines providing off-the-grid power. Local groups have complained about air pollution and noted the turbines are operated without a permit as they're technically portable, which some see as abuse of a legal loophole.

The US The US government, in fact, recently intervened in a lawsuit to shut down the turbines, claiming that Colossus is a matter of national security

On Tuesday, SpaceX announced that residents in the greater Memphis area will receive half-price Starlink subscriptions and free hardware for new signups

In addition, the mayor of Memphis recently announced that SpaceX has recommitted to the construction of a wastewater treatment plant. Those plans had been halted in April, with SpaceX claiming they were prioritizing the construction of the Colossus Two data center. However, the construction halt came just days before the lawsuit was filed.

Announcing the discount, VP of Starlink, Michael Nichols wrote, " The unique capabilities of the Colossus Data Center could not be accomplished without the partnership and support from the local Memphis community. Happy to bring affordable and great Starlink connectivity to our neighbors."

Look, Look, directionally, I'm glad that we're starting to see this But I have to [00:10:00] say



but for anyone from SpaceX who might be listening, while I applaud this direction, I would be going a lot harder than a half-price discount

For people who have to become your customers to even get that discount still some encouraging signs that we're starting to think differently about these relationships. Still, that's gonna do it for today's headlines. Next up, the main episode 

One of the most important AI questions right now isn't who's using ai, it's who's using it? Well,

KPMG and the University of Texas at Austin. Just to analyzed 1.4 million real workplace AI interactions and found something surprising. The highest impact users aren't better prompt engineers. They treat AI like a reasoning partner.

They frame problems, guide thinking, iterate, and push for better answers. and the good news, these behaviors are teachable at scale.

If you're trying to move from AI access to real capability, KPMG's research on sophisticated AI collaboration is worth your time. Learn more at kpmg.com/us/slash [00:11:00] sophisticated. That's kpmg.com/us/sophisticated. I cover the capability gap between AI potential and AI reality every day on this show most companies are still figuring out how to start. Robots and Pencils is already launching and scaling. Agentic generative AI in production at large enterprises in weeks. AWS Advanced Tier pattern partner more than doubled in a year

And they're hiring

50 open roles. If you're someone who knows this moment is different, who wants to be inside it, not watching it, this is worth a look. At Robots and Pencils, the best ideas win, and the team is purposefully kept super high quality

This is the kind of place you look back on as the best decision you ever made. Take a look at robotsandpencils.com/careers 



if you're looking to adopt an age agentic, SDLC, blitzie is the key to unlocking unmatched engineering velocity.

Blitzes differentiation starts with infinite code context. Thousands of specialized agents ingest millions of lines of your code in a singlepass. Mapping every dependency

with a complete [00:12:00] contextual understanding of your code base. Enterprises leverage blitz at the beginning of every sprint to deliver over 80% of the work autonomously,

enterprise grade, end-to-end tested code that leverages your existing services, components and standards. This isn't AI auto complete. This is spec and test driven development at the speed of compute. Schedule a technical deep dive with our AI experts@blitz.com. That's BLI tz y.com.



This episode This episode of the AI Daily Brief is brought to you by Hyperagent where you run fleets of agents your team can manage together New users get 1000 in inference Forget local agents and chat workflows waiting on your laptop to be prompted Hyperagent deploys alwayson agents in the cloud doing real work across the tools your team already uses Marketing's agent turns competitor moves into landing pages sales agent enriches leads drafts emails and updates the CRM ops agent chases the paperwork and tracks the budget Every agent has access to shared context and follows your rules about scope and approvals It's time you add agents that feel like teammates Hire yours at Hyperagent built by the team at Airtable Claim your [00:13:00] 1000 in inference at hyperagent.com/aidailybrief.

Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief

Well, friends, after something like 19 days offline

It should be that by the time you're listening to this



Fable 5 has been turned back on. On On Tuesday night, Anthropic announced that the government had lifted export controls and cleared them to begin redeploying Fable 5.

At At 7:52 PM, this tweet exploded onto the scene. "We've received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls. We'll begin restoring access tomorrow. And we'll share an update soon. We're grateful to our users for their patience and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models."

A A few hours later, they shared further details on the rollout. beginning today, July 1st Fable 5 will once again be available to all global users across all paid subscriptions

There will be a short extension of the subsidy period that we were promised when it first came out. Fable 5 will be included for up to 50% of weekly usage limits until next Tuesday. But after that, access [00:14:00] to the model will require the purchase of usage credits.

Mythos restrictions remain as they were at the end of last week, with approved US firms able to access the model for both domestic and foreign workers. Anthropic said they will continue to work with the government on an expanded rollout under Project Glasswing, including providing the model to international firms



Several administration officials commented on the resolution. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who according to reports has been one of the AI policy leads in recent months, wrote, " Under President Trump's leadership, the United States is the undisputed winner in the AI race. My gratitude to companies across industries who continue to work closely with the White House to implement the president's executive order Promoting advanced AI innovation and security.

This includes excellent work around advanced model access and guardrail testing and security. The government and private sector have worked together in a way we have never seen before, and this foundation of America first is unprecedented. Our shared priority remains get the best tech deployed as quickly and safely as possible

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has been in charge of applying the export controls, added more specifically, " Over the [00:15:00] past two weeks, we have worked closely with Anthropic to analyze and improve Fable 5 to ensure alignment across the US government and strengthen America's leadership in AI."

Now, alongside the announcement, Anthropic provided their own version of the events of the past few weeks



they discussed the jailbreak reported by Amazon and their efforts to convince the administration that nothing was amiss. As a refresher, the core claim was that Fable was able to identify serious vulnerabilities in a code base, which the administration believed was a Mythos-level capability.

" "Our Our testing," wrote Anthropic confirmed that many less capable models, including Claude Opus 4.8, GPT 5.5, and Kimi K2.7 could identify the same vulnerabilities as Fable 5 did in the report. When it came to the demonstration of how to exploit the single vulnerability, every model we tested could produce the same demonstration as Fable 5, including Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.6

Opus 4.6, Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.5, and Kimiko 2.7 Importantly, they continued, the reported technique did not [00:16:00] expose any unique Mythos-level cyber capabilities. The behavior reflected a borderline case for Fable 5's safeguards There are some tasks that are unlikely to be dangerous but are nonetheless blocked by the safeguards out of an abundance of caution.

The reported technique allowed access to one such behavior, but it only involved routine defensive cybersecurity work. Now, this has been Anthropic's position from the beginning, that although this was a genuine jailbreak, it didn't unleash dangerous capabilities

Nevertheless, Anthropic has amped up the guardrails for Fables Return. They have trained a new classifier designed to target and block the behavior described in the Amazon report with a claimed success rate of ninety-nine percent. As As with the previous version, users will be informed if they trip the guardrails and will be reverted to Opus four eight for that request

Anthropic said that they have tested the new classifier with the Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation, which agrees that Anthropic safeguards are "extraordinarily strong." Anthropic noted, " The new classifier also comes at the cost of flagging benign requests more often during routine coding and debugging tasks.

As with all our [00:17:00] safeguards, we'll continue to refine this to better distinguish genuine misuse from legitimate requests and reduce false positives."

Now, one of the first responses

Was effectively that while folks were glad that Fable was coming back, it wasn't exactly clear what had changed that addressed the government's initial concerns Policy advisor Dean Ball wrote, "Great news, but we have no idea what Anthropic did to make the model safe, what commitments Anthropic has made going forward, and whether or how any of this applies to other frontier models in the government's licensing queue.

We know that GPT 5.6 is in that queue, but it's fair to assume that other model developers are at least in early stages of submitting their models." reinforcing the point that he has made over and over again, Dean continued, " This opacity will not lend itself well to a stable, investable, trustworthy industry over time

But, and here Dean ends on a positive note, " The The US government needn't figure this all out in a day, and a two-week review timeline is not insane in the grand scheme of things. The status quo is not tenable, but we made progress today." That progress is just a first step, but it is worthy of applause nonetheless.



Prinze also pointed out how many new [00:18:00] questions, the letter about the export controls being lifted brought up

With Anthropic agreeing to quote, proactively detect and address security risks associated with Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Prince asks, how is Anthropic required to proactively detect these security risks? Not publicly disclosed

When Anthropic agrees to work diligently with the US government on protocols and standards and releases for Mythos, Fable, and future models, Prinz notes that this is extremely broad language that appears to cover all future models and is not limited to cybersecurity risks Still, I think Miles Brundage captured the sentiment of many when he wrote, " wrote, The first rule of Fable Club is you do not ask too many questions about what exactly Anthropic agreed to that they weren't doing before, and you enjoy your access."



And overall, from a policy perspective, that seems to be the tone, even though people have lots of questions. The fact that we're getting the model back in this version

gives people reason to be cautiously optimistic

Writes Box's Writes Box's Aaron Levie, " It's been a messy process to get here, but at least there's some semblance of a framework that could be practical." The note of caution here would be that there's a lot of subjectivity that goes into various risks and their act- actual levels of exploitability in practice.

We're We're likely going to be [00:19:00] living with a framework that requires heavy judgment and back and forth between labs and the government for major releases. The best we can hope for is that this is a relatively efficient process and hopefully has ways of being sped up for incremental version updates and models.



it would be a bad outcome if every release after this level of threshold of capability required the same review process and we don't get the same rate of breakthroughs we've been seeing

Now, one of the reasons that I think people were m- were willing to extend that benefit of the doubt was that as recently as yesterday, people were speculating about Fable 5 coming back only with things like a new KYC regime, where people had to verify their identities, and perhaps verify their identities as American citizens before they could get access

That appears not to be the case. Fable five is not just coming back for US users, but for all users globally

And And yet

There is a big question lurking



when I tweeted an image of Dario and Uncle Sam riding an eagle delivering Fable across America flanked by fighter jets

Aaron Schneider asked the key question, " But will it be as good as we remember?"



the specific concern comes around [00:20:00] this line from the announcement: " In the near term, some routine tasks like coding and debugging will fall back to Opus 4.8."

4.8." That led folks like Lasan on X to write, " The Fable 5 relaunch is kind of fake. Some routine tasks like coding and debugging will fall back to Opus 4.8. You can use that even more restricted Fable 5 version in your Anthropic subscriptions until July 7th."

Lex on X wrote, " "LMFAO, LMFAO, this cannot be a real statement from Anthropic. Routine tasks like coding, skull emoji. They've lost their minds. Do they think people are paying an abs- absurdly high price just for the privilege?"

Now to read from the Claude Code team came on to clarify that that tweet had particularly loose language He wrote, " "As As with the original classifiers, a small fraction of routine coding and debugging tasks will be flagged and fall back to Opus." In other words, while the tweet made it seem like coding and debugging were part of the routine tasks that would fall back to Opus in general

The Claude Code team is saying that no, in fact, it is just a small fraction of routine coding tasks that will be flagged in that way

Now, given all this, I wanna come back and talk [00:21:00] about the ways that I think you should start to test Fable right away when it comes back. But before that, we actually do have one more Anthropic model to talk about

Earlier on Earlier on Tuesday, Anthropic announced Claude Sonnet 5. And if I had to guess, this suggests to me that they were not sure

that Fable would be coming back as fast as it was, as I'm not sure that they would have announced this particular model when they did, in the way that they did, if they knew that later that night they'd get to announce that Fable 5 was coming back

Anthropic Anthropic pitched the model as their most agentic version of Sonnet yet, writing, " It can make plans, use tools like browsers and terminals, and run autonomously at a level that just a few months ago required larger and more expensive models."

Now, according to the benchmarks Anthropic tried to pitch the model as almost as good as Opus 4-8 for a fraction of the cost

It's a few percentage points shy of Opus on the two major coding benchmarks, Swebench Pro and TerminalBench 2.1, with the same gap existing for computer use and knowledge benchmarks

Maybe the most interesting result was GDPVal, where Sonnet 5 delivered a huge jump over Sonnet 4.6 and even [00:22:00] slightly outperformed Now, this could be indicative of the strong agentic performance that Anthropic was touting. While GDP Val aims to measure economically valuable work, in practice, the score largely comes down to successful tool calls

Sonnet 5's score could indicate that it's much more capable of following through with end-to-end agentic work rather than getting stuck halfway through

While Sonnet 5 retains the same pricing as Sonnet 4.8, Anthropic is trying an introductory price for API use. Until the end of August, Sonnet 5 will cost two $10 per million input tokensand $10 per million output tokens, and will revert to the standard $3 and $15 after that. In contrast, the price for Opus is $5 and $25, so Sonnet 5 could be a more cost-effective option for some use cases

But But what about external benchmarks and actual user impressions?

on cursors, cursor, on cursors, cursor bench



They wrote that it was a meaningful step up from Sonnet 4.6

It also saw a jump on the artificial analysis intelligence index from Claude Sonnet 4.6's forty-seven to a score of fifty-three, which puts it just one point behind Claude [00:23:00] Opus and a couple points behind 55

But they point out that without the promotional pricing, it will actually cost more per task than Opus 4.8

On On max effort, they write, " Sonnet-5 used around 40% more output tokens per intelligence task than Sonnet 4.6, and around three times the number of agentic turns for their knowledge work evaluations."

The overall run, in fact, cost more than Opus 4.8

4.8 This is because it generates almost twice as many tokens as Opus 4A per task

And when it came to running the entire bench of tasks, Sonnet 5 was actually more expensive than Fable

That led a lot of people to wonder what the heck this is actually for. Max Blade wrote, " "Composer Composer 2.5 is faster, GLM, GLM 5.2 is cheaper, Opus 4.8 output is 10 times better. It's an improvement, yes, but without a real use case, it is dead on arrival right now. Will you guys be running it?"



now one important caveat with that



is that the artificial analysis tests are run at max settings, and that might not be the optimal way to run Sonnet 5. David Shapiro David [00:24:00] Shapiro writes: " Okay, I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but Sonnet 5 Max is too high effort. It's like giving a box of squirrels a bunch of cocaine and saying, 'Go with God,' and just seeing what comes out the other side



Ben Davis who works with YouTuber Theo wrote, after doing around a billion of tokens on it today, you're all wrong, Sonnet five is good. Is it inefficient? Yes. Slow? Yes. Expensive? Yes. But if you think it's the same as GLM 5.2, a model I really like and will continue to defend a ton, you're a fool.

The thing with this model is you have to use it wildly differently. It's not the type of Sonnet model we're used to. Probably could've been Opus five if it was slightly bigger."

It's basically an automatic Ralph loop. It's spawning tons of sub-agents, making many stacked PRs, reviewing itself adversarially, auto-testing its changes, and not drifting of-task at all If you use this thing the same way you've been using old models, you're gonna have a bad time

Indeed, some are wondering If the real way to look at Sonnet 5 is as the work model

That would run the sub-agents that something like Fable 5 would spin up

Dan McAdie writes, " You'll use Fable 5 as the super intelligent advisor and Sonnet 5 as the fast and efficient [00:25:00] implementer."

Still, when push comes to shove, the model that people are really excited about having back is Fable 5



and for anyone who used it in those first three days that it was actually available, you'll understand why So the question becomes, as Fable 5 comes back online and we have this one week where you can use it in your normal subscriptions, what should you be using it for?



Panjwani writes: You have one week to use Fable 5 without going bankrupt. Here's how you should make the most of it. One, One, use Fable 5 for planning, not for implementation. Use the Codex plugin in Claude Code to delegate implementation to GPT-55. Two, Two, ask Fable for suggested improvements on your projects, starting with your most important and valuable projects.

Three, use Opus and GPT-55 to brainstorm what your hardest technical problems are across your projects, and then ask Fable to propose solutions to them. Four, use Four, use GPT Pro through Oracle to review Fable's output

Now this reflects Now this reflects a lot of the advice that was around when Fable 5 first came out. basically that what it was for was your hardest challenges and that it was almost too powerful for routine [00:26:00] day-to-day things Now, I agree with half of this The half where Fable is very good at your most difficult, specifically technical problems.

And to the extent you have some of those, whether you're technical or not, if you're working on some hard coding project, obviously spend as much time as you can using Fable 5 for that. But one But one thing that already, in the very first couple of days of using Fable 5 that I disagreed with the common sentiment around was that you wouldn't necessarily notice the difference using Fable 5 on more routine, banal, non-technical tasks.

In In my experience, that was completely wrong



likely the two most common categories of tasks that I have outside of coding, building, and prototyping things is strategic thinking and writing

Now on strategy



Fable 5, in my limited experience, blew GPT-5, 5 and Opus 4-8 out of the water



both of those two models are extremely steerable



they are overly deferential to pushback



and tend to over-interpret instructions. For For example, if you ask them a strategic question and then try to say something to reduce sycophancy like, " [00:27:00] Don't just accept what I'm saying as true. Provide pushback if it's warranted Those models will assume 100% that their response will only be successful if there is pushback. Then however If you push back on them, they will cave almost immediately and go out of their way to justify whatever it has become clear

they think you're trying to get them to say Fable 5 didn't do that. In In my interactions with Fable 5 as I was debating with it, it would frequently accept part of my pushback or ideas while sticking to its guns on other parts. That is behavior that I have never seen from any other model and instantly made it a thousand times more valuable when it came to any sort of strategic thinking or iteration Given that every single one of you, I guarantee, has strategic questions that you are working through at any given time, this is something that I would immediately experiment with in Fable.

And by the way, it also has the benefit of not really consuming all that many tokens, so it's not going to use up that fifty percent usage limit particularly quickly common, the second common sentiment that I wanna push back on is around writing now arguably Every is the most thoughtful tester when it comes to new models in writing

[00:28:00] And in their initial vibe check



it wasn't in their estimation all that much better. They called it sharp judgment trapped in familiar prose They wrote, "Every's writing benchmark found that Fable's writing is clear, but still short of human judgment on what to include in a piece of writing and how to structure it."

The benchmark asks the model to write an introduction from scratch, fill in a missing paragraph from context, and deliver a promotional email, a LinkedIn post, and an X post. On the editing side, it asks the model to replicate human edits and detect common AI-isms in a deliberately robotic draft

and and set to extra high effort for this It basically scored between Sonnet 46 and Opus 48 Now, on a particular type of writing task, this is not what I found

in my not tests, but real world uses of Fable 5 for writing

I found that it was way better at instruction following, And fell into far fewer of the common AI traps



its writing wasn't overly wrought and try-hard

It had fewer of the standout AI-isms like it's not this, it's that. and while I would want more reps in to say definitively that it's better for all types of writing, my suspicion is that especially in [00:29:00] situations where you have a fairly clear rubric of what a good example of writing looks like, I think it's going to be able to do a much better job at meeting that standard than those previous models were.

Now, that now that doesn't mean that it's any better at blank page writing. given how many of people's writing use cases for AI are saying, "Here's all the examples of what has been done in the past.

Do this type of thing in the future," my experience so far is that Fable 5 is much better at that

Look, when all is said and done, it is extremely, extremely welcome news that it is coming back to everyone



while I don't think that you should change your Fourth of July plans to stay inside hacking at some big project I certainly wouldn't blame you if you did. for now, that's gonna do it for the AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always, and until next time, peace 

​
