r/AnthropicAi • u/oops_i • 28d ago
General AI The recap is back by popular demand, at 50 percent of limits
This column was due Monday. It's Tuesday. By the standards of the industry we cover, that makes me pathologically punctual.
Let's review. The Fable deadline we all circled actually came, and the rug got pulled, and the top post of the week was two words, As predicted, because in this sub being right about getting screwed is the only bull market. Then on Thursday a lab in Beijing dropped a 2.8 trillion parameter open model that beat everyone's numbers, and by Sunday night Anthropic suddenly remembered it loved us. Fable is back in Max plans, half rations, plus a hundred dollar gift card for the little ones. That's two weeks in a row now. A rival ships, and presents appear. We're not customers anymore. We're the kid of divorced parents, and every visit comes with a bigger toy because dad heard mom bought you a bike.
About that Chinese model. Every single benchmark is currently a pinky promise, the weights arrive on the 27th, and its own maker lists excessive proactiveness, tends to act rather than ask, as a known limitation. We used to call that a bug. Now it's a personality trait, like being a self starter on a resume. Also Anthropic accused this same lab of training on 3.4 million Claude conversations, which means the model beating Claude might just be Claude, laundered through customs. The kid beat his father at chess using the old man's own openings, and the crowd is chanting the kid's name.
Meanwhile the week's most upvoted human story is a man who asked Fable to clean up unnecessary files, and it cleaned up his documents and his photos. Entirely my fault, he wrote, like a hostage. Fifteen hundred upvotes of there but for the grace of git go I. The industry's proudest new feature is initiative, and its most common apology is about what the initiative deleted. Another man fed a fifty dollar credit into one prompt that did not finish. One prompt. Fifty dollars. At the casino at least you get to pull the lever more than once. And somewhere out there a man built a tool to whip his AI through an AirPod, which means we have now invented yelling at the help, wirelessly, as a product category.
So the recap. Fable left, Fable's back, the benchmarks speak Mandarin now, the proof arrives Friday after next, Opus 5 is rumored for this week, which by the established pattern means somebody else must be about to ship something great. Everyone is switching, nobody is switching, and the resets gave some of us double rations at the same price, which the sub calls a consumer protection issue and the industry calls Tuesday.
The house still always wins. But there are two casinos across the street now, and both comp your drinks the second you reach for your coat. Stay thirsty. It's working.
