This is the US government hobbling Anthropic after they didn’t let the pentagon use it for building a domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons systems.
But I don’t doubt the US will continue trying to block AI exports.
Sadly, I doubt it would have any meaningful impact.
Instead, it’ll be marketed as "Fable 5: it’s so good, the U.S. government won’t share it (…but yours now, for the low monthly payment of 20 dollars + plus your ID and your families)
They weren’t going to let people have it that cheap for very long. The plan was to offer it on subscription plans for a couple weeks, then move to usage-based billing, which is much more expensive for a usage pattern that comes anywhere near the subscription limits.
Keeping a single instance of Fable busy for a full day would probably cost a thousand dollars at standard API rates, and some agentic coding workflows run many agents in parallel. Companies have just recently started to figure out that rewarding employees for how many tokens they use may be a waste of money, but Anthropic is hoping to cash in before they all do.
Sorry, couldn’t help myself. Good metrics are hard, but token leaderboards are obviously terrible metrics that will lead to bad business outcomes unless propped up by investor hype. Of course investor hype is a real factor, and it’s often driven by guesses about what other investors will do rather than real business outcomes.
Oh no. That will hurt Anthropic’s projected revenue. Won’t someone please think of the shareholders?
This is hype to make them sound badass.
This is the US government hobbling Anthropic after they didn’t let the pentagon use it for building a domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons systems.
But I don’t doubt the US will continue trying to block AI exports.
I can see this angle too.
It’s not that people don’t want to use, they can’t!
It’s exclusive, and that works on idiots
Sadly, I doubt it would have any meaningful impact.
Instead, it’ll be marketed as "Fable 5: it’s so good, the U.S. government won’t share it (…but yours now, for the low monthly payment of 20 dollars + plus your ID and your families)
They weren’t going to let people have it that cheap for very long. The plan was to offer it on subscription plans for a couple weeks, then move to usage-based billing, which is much more expensive for a usage pattern that comes anywhere near the subscription limits.
Keeping a single instance of Fable busy for a full day would probably cost a thousand dollars at standard API rates, and some agentic coding workflows run many agents in parallel. Companies have just recently started to figure out that rewarding employees for how many tokens they use may be a waste of money, but Anthropic is hoping to cash in before they all do.
The Pro plan ran out of usage with Fable in like 10-20 minutes anyway. It’s not like they let you use it a lot in the subscription.
IIRC the plan was also to bring it back to the sub when hype dies down
Any company that only recently figured this out deserves to go bankrupt.
It’s like giving people company cars and rewarding them for using the most gas. Only that driving somewhere is at least sometimes required.
You’re absolutely right!
Sorry, couldn’t help myself. Good metrics are hard, but token leaderboards are obviously terrible metrics that will lead to bad business outcomes unless propped up by investor hype. Of course investor hype is a real factor, and it’s often driven by guesses about what other investors will do rather than real business outcomes.