This Week in AI in 5 Minutes: Fable Chaos Edition

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on The AI Daily Brief, This Week in AI for Terrifyingly Busy People. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
A quick note before we get into this episode. On Friday evening, as many of us were settling in with our families or watching the first US game at the World Cup, the tides of power in AI shifted in a fairly fundamental way. Based on a report from at the time, an unnamed party which later turned out to be Amazon, the US government directed Anthropic to cut off access to all foreign nationals for Fable 5 and Mythos 5 In order to ensure compliance with the request, Anthropic took the models down entirely for everyone. There are many implications of this, not least of which is that the recommendations at the end of this 5-minute recap episode to go out and try Fable 5 don't exactly work at the moment. Now, I will be recording a full emergency episode to go out later today on Saturday, June 13th. However, I did still want to have this 5-minute recap as I attempt to continue to make this show more accessible for an even wider audience. So enjoy this partial recap of what ended up being an extraordinarily consequential week in AI, and I'll be back soon with the full news about the Anthropic Fable 5 shutdown. All right, friends, welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today, we continue our experiment in these hyperfast 5-minute weekly recaps. I had a lot of positive response last week, and for those of you who missed that, the idea of these episodes is two-part. First, a lot of you have colleagues, friends, family, who don't have time to listen to a whole slew of 25- or 30-minute episodes in a week, but who do want to know, broadly speaking, the most important stuff that happened in AI, this is the episode that you can send them. Second, even you die-hard listeners sometimes have weeks where you're just busy doing, I don't know, real work, or sailing around the Mediterranean or something. Consider these episodes for you as well.
Now, we kick off today with the biggest story of the week, which happens to also be the biggest release of the week, which is of course Claude's Fable 5
Yes, we finally have a Mythos class model. For the last couple of months, ever since the news of Mythos broke and was then confirmed by Anthropic, us and the Pleb class have just been waiting as big institutions get to check it out through Project Glasswing, eagerly anticipating the day when we too would have the powers of Mythos.
Well, this week we got them, and powers they were indeed. All of the benchmarks were obviously massive, but was it actually better? Well, aside from the controversy, which we will get to in just a minute, on average, I would say, the vast majority of people that I saw that really dug into Fable found it to be incredibly powerful and a distinct jump up from what was previously available. In fact, there was this clever little narrative running around that we'd reach the point where AI was so advanced that unless you were using it for really powerful things, you wouldn't necessarily know the difference. Citrini Research tweeted, I think we've reached the point where normal people can't really determine whether new models are better than previous ones. Like, Fable doesn't seem that much better to me, but every 150 IQ person I know is like, wow, the singularity came sooner than I thought. Now, I think this has a hint of truth to it in that where Fable uniquely shines is super hard things, but I also think that this is kind of wrong too, because in my experience, Fable 5 is way, way better for the basic things as well. It is, in my opinion, a much better strategic thinker, and it is also a much better first principles arguer in that it doesn't kowtow and isn't as easily manipulable by the person prompting it. That makes it a much more valuable thought partner, so if you are doing anything with strategy, even if you are not coding big unwieldy web apps, I think you will find a lot of benefit to Fable 5
TLDR, I definitely think that if you haven't yet, you should go try Fable 5 soon.
In fact, by soon I mean really soon, because you only have a limited time to do so. That's because Fable 5 was not only the biggest story and the biggest release of the week, but also the biggest controversy of the week. Now, the part that I just eluded to is that Fable 5 is only available in normal plans until June 22nd. After that, you're going to have to pay for it through the API on a usage basis. This certainly continues the trend that we've seen of companies moving to a usage-based model instead of a seat-based model. So some of the impact of that was dampened by the fact that it wasn't all that unexpected. Yet when it comes to the controversy that was small potatoes compared to first, the fact that there were incredibly stringent guardrails on the thing. Biomedical engineer Daria Anutmaz wrote, I can't even say hello to Fable except in incognito mode because it knows I am a biomedical researcher. Fable 5 also launched with data retention policies that said that they could keep conversations for 30 days in ways that basically made every enterprise sit up and say, I don't think so. Already we saw Microsoft limit employee use of Fable 5 as they figure out what the data retention policies mean for them. And yet the biggest deal in the controversy was for sure the secret sabotage for LLM researchers. While the approach to the other guardrails around things like biology and chemistry was to explicitly tell the user that it was shifting them back to a previous model like Opus 48, when it came to certain types of LLM research, Anthropic said that Fable 5 would nerve its responses without telling the user. This led to an uproar the likes of which I've never seen, ultimately leading Anthropic to walk back that policy in less than 24 hours. Now it turns out that what people were really turned off by wasn't just that specific policy, but the realization of just how much power Anthropic and frankly any of these frontier labs really has to control who gets access to the tools of the next stage of the economy. In fact, this week I think we saw the confluence of the three great challenges for AI labs, power i.e. the inherent power they have over our economic destiny, policy, in other words the choices they make in terms of how they wield that power, and PR in terms of how they communicate that stuff, which honestly Anthropic got all three of them wrong this week.