Fable 5.
Steering is no longer the same as doing.
“It’s the first thing I read every morning.” — David Barboza, founder of WireScreen and former Shanghai Bureau Chief for The New York Times.
1. Anthropic is releasing a next-generation “Mythos-class” model to the general public with guardrails that remove dangerous capabilities related to areas such as cybersecurity and biological research. Called Claude Fable 5, the large language model will mostly let users query Mythos, which the company previously deemed was too dangerous for general release. However, if users ask Fable about sensitive issues such as a bioweapon or exploiting a software bug, it will kick them back to the older Opus 4.8 version of the Claude chatbot. Fable 5 will cost more than Opus 4.8, but it will also do a better job of remembering things. That will make it better at completing large, complex tasks with fewer instructions, said Dianne Penn, Anthropic’s head of product management, research and labs. (Sources: anthropic.com, wsj.com)
2. Ethan Mollick:
Fable is twice as expensive as Opus, and it burns through tokens at a rate that suggests the answer to how much it costs in production is “a lot,” though its clever delegation to cheaper models may lower the real price considerably. The guardrails for Fable also trip at the faintest hint of a security problem, defaulting to the less powerful Claude 4.8 Opus, and it happens way too often. And the jagged frontier is still there. For example, the AI still writes in the same weird style (in fact the software Fable produces bears traces of Claudisms; so do its progress reports, all that carrying the weight and earning the answer). But the deeper strangeness is how little I had to do, and how little I could see while it was being done.
Last year I called this working with a wizard: you chant the spell and something happens. With Fable the spell has gotten powerful enough that I am no longer sure I am the wizard. I am closer to a patron. I describe what I want, I pay for it, and I judge the result. The conjuring happens somewhere I cannot watch, in hundreds of small choices I never get a vote on. The work has shifted from process to outcome. I no longer steer; I commission.
It is possible the sidelining is temporary, just an artifact of interfaces that haven’t caught up, and that we’ll get better windows into what these models are doing and better ways to steer them midstream. It is also possible that the opposite is true: that the more capable the model, the less there is for a human to meaningfully do, and the black box is the price of the power. I suspect that is more likely to be the real direction. None of this is a loss of control in the obvious sense. I can still steer Fable, and it follows instructions remarkably well: the more ambitious the instruction, the better the result. But steering is no longer the same as doing. I brief the model, it spins up its own agents to research and write and check one another’s work, and what comes back is finished. A patron commissions a single artist. Fable is closer to a whole studio, where I am the client who signs off on the final work without ever setting foot on the floor. (Source: substack.com. Italics mine)
3. Treatments based on the same mRNA technology that delivered COVID-19 vaccines to market in record time are showing lasting benefit against the deadly skin cancer melanoma and early promise in pancreatic and brain cancers once considered impervious to immune system assault. The apparent breakthroughs in cancer vaccines - deemed one of the fastest-growing segments of cancer research - are arriving even as U.S. officials send conflicting signals about the technology’s merits and safety. More than 130 studies were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago this month focused on such efforts. At the forefront was Moderna and Merck whose treatment combining a powerful immunotherapy drug with an experimental made-to-order mRNA cancer vaccine has kept melanoma at bay for five years, a milestone in efforts to create personalized vaccines to train the immune system to fight cancer. The companies are testing mRNA-based therapies in nine large and midsize trials in lung, kidney, bladder and pancreas cancers, and may have early results from their large confirmatory trial in melanoma this year. (Source: reuters.com)
4. The outspoken longevity scientist David Sinclair has been predicting that one day, you’ll go to the doctor and get a prescription that will make you 10 years younger. Now MIT Technology Review has learned that he has plans to launch human tests of an oral “reprogramming” drug as part of a $101 million competition organized by the XPrize Foundation. The foundation is offering cash awards to teams able to “restore” a person to an earlier apparent age, as measured by improvements in immune, cognitive, and muscle function. The grand prize goes to any team able to show a 10-year (or greater) relative improvement after one year of treatment. Reached by phone, Sinclair, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, confirmed that he plans to give an oral drug mixture to volunteers in a bid to seek “evidence for age restoration in humans.” (Sources: sinclair.hms.harvard.edu, technologyreview.com, xprize.org)
