The funny thing about Fable, is we all but know it will be obsolete in a month or two. Between their embargo shenanigans (which IMO they could have avoided just by not pretending it was dangerous) and continuing to give access, whatever marginal advantage it had was essentially wasted.

It would have been an interesting experiment to charge more for it right away and see what the market would bear, rather than tease it for long enough for it to be presumably superseded any time now by whatever is next.

>5.6 Sol, competitive with Fable (or close enough), and it's available via subscription (even the $20 subscription!)

It's not comparable because OpenAI caps thinking to High in the ChatGPT "Chat" interface (and the "Work" thing where it actually does let us use Extra or Max is fucking shit).

GPT 5.6 Sol (High) is almost certainly worse than Opus 4.8 (Extra), and nowhere close to Fable (Extra).

I literally got a refund for my $20 OpenAI subscription after playing around with 5.6 Sol for a couple of hours (yes even on Codex) because it's so unusable and I'd rather just use Fable today and 4.8 Extra starting tomorrow, still within my $20 Anthropic plan. And I'm not even poor, I was just angry at how bad it is.

Yeah, I've started reaching for local models more. I'll use frontier models at the current cost for tasks that the local ones aren't great at, but when the rug pull inevitably comes, to me they're not worth 1000-2000 a month. And honestly, for my purposes I don't really need models to advance a lot. Like, I tried fable a couple of times and there just wasn't much there to justify its use to me. Opus did the same thing much cheaper.

I think an interesting question is going to be, if models are a commodity, who is going to want to foot the very expensive bill to train them? I'm sure training cost will drop.. eventually, but I doubt it will happen fast enough for any of these companies.

> But, at token rates, 10x or 100x the cost of open models or what I was spending on the frontier models a month ago

And we can't ignore the power of "good enough". GLM5.2 may not be as good as the SOTA models, but it can be good enough for most, of not all, of our needs.

In 5-10 years an Apple Watch will run a Fable level model locally. I don’t think we (hackers) should worry too much about token cost inflation. The current wave of providers, that’s another story.

Just to clarify your implication: Fable subscription usage was just (re)extended to July 19

> It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it.

Think airlines - both passenger and freight. They have never come close to capturing all the economic value they enable.

Frontier labs will figure out all sorts of ways to wiggle into the value chain beyond being commodities.

While I do agree there will be disruption we haven't seen yet, my company is already spending >$40k/day for a "frontier model", so who knows. Then again, they're not using that for coding

Who is going to end up capturing all this value being generated is going to be very interesting. Back in 1980, who’d have thought MS would capture the majority of the value from PCs over the next 3 decades, and not IBM?