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I'm really uncomfortable with these changes, like everything Anthropic's doing as "frontier research" today will be regular product engineering in a year.
It’s very frustrating…
I don't understand how businesses could trust cloud LLMs going forward with this ongoing "safety" paranoia. Building dependence on them doesn't feel like a sane strategic decision for users.
Of course you can trust them.

Just do benchmarks yourself on the new model and decide if it is valuable for your usecase, even with the supposed nerfing.

Benchmarks are benchmarks. And you can ignore the data at your own risk.

It isn’t about trust or no trust, it’s about having a capability to do stuff vs not having it. If Fable is the only model doing the right thing in your use case, your only choice is to use it or not. If the efficiency gain is 2x, it’s a hit you can probably take. If it’s 100x you pay up and shut up.
It is absolutely fine to distill the IP of everyone else, but you'd be violating the TOS to distill ours :)
I tried today and it gave cybersecurity error on base64 implementation. It is so nerfed....
At this point you're criminally incompetent if you still feed your proprietary data and code to AI labs.

They legally can steal it all and now you can't use the product of this theft to improve your own systems.

It's a SaaS, when in the history of SaaS has it ever been a good idea to trust that the company won't ruin the product under you?
I guess an uncharitable way to read this might be “the ML engineers/scientists want to automate all of the jobs except their own.”
Getting major deja vu from like 10 years back when people were arguing 3D printers would 3D print other 3D printers.
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“When you realize the goal is the path, the pursuit itself becomes the prize. Stones in the road are not obstacles blocking your path; they are the path”

now I understand distillation is much more important thank I thought

"Claude can now be silently nerfed. Anthropic has decided it won't tell users when this happens." W T F!!
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Disillusioned CEOs convincing themselves they have the mandate and right to define morality for everyone else. They get to decide what is right, wrong, permissible, or dangerous from the top, in the name of "safety". This is corporate nannying.
This makes Fable unusable for me. If I cannot tell whether I am paying for the whole service or just a partial one, because somehow their guardrails have decided my work silently broke their terms of service, then I prefer to go to older models or alternatives
> If Claude gives me poor or incorrect advice while I’m working on an AI component, I have no way of knowing whether the model was confused, whether my problem is unsolvable, or if some invisible policy restriction quietly kicked in. Anthropic has explicitly chosen not to tell users when this is happening.

That's always been the case with corporate LLMs.

I'm a big fan of Anthropic. Just check my post history. I've been accused of working there. But this is complete bullshit and they need to get real. Silent sandbagging is not acceptable, especially given they've shown with this release their safety filters have HUGE amounts of false positives.
I'm fairly certain they were doing something similar already possibly with some quantizations and not for the good humanity but just trying to handle the increased usage. Not for API requests though, just subscription CLI usage.
This kind of opacity is unacceptably user hostile. It's not okay to treat some amount of developers as acceptable casualties, without them even knowing, in order to help enforce a restriction that only serves Anthropic's interests. And if you want to tell me this is for managing the x-risk factor, I'm frankly unimpressed.
This is a fun peek into the economic implications of RSI/ASI. Because it's so infinitely valuable that it basically destroys all markets, labs will eventually do stuff like stop releasing models completely and skipping out on contracted commitments because they'll have the power to just drive their competitors out of business before the legal battle gets expensive.

Cloud providers - at first smaller ones, then the hyperscalers - will follow suit, completely closing sales to anyone but the labs and demanding payment in equity/direct decision-making power rather than cash. There's no particular reason why the inference/training split has to be 80/20, and no amount of willingness to pay can help you in an event that turns your money worthless.

Way before that it will become political. Regulation is the only true threat left anyways.
> Because it's so infinitely valuable that it basically destroys all markets

We have 8 billion natural intelligences already. (Each of them more intelligent than any LLM.)

For some reason this didn't destroy all markets. There's also diverging opinion about infinite value.

This is crazy and would be frustrating, I probably would just be using another model as authority and keep fable as reviewer only in this case.
Is there some consumer protection law around this?
It seems we now have a new product category, HaaS, Hallucination as a Service.
I'm sure someone is gonna be able to jailbreak, abliterate, or equivalent, on this input moderation attempt they have going on.
Good luck getting around something when you have no idea how and when it affects you.
They have a silent nerfing system for their models and say so openly. The obvious question is how much it is being used already.

Competitor companies being nerfed?

Non Americans getting worse code?

Punishing and rewarding users to maximize engagement, like online games do affecting victories through matchmaking?

No big pockets and ask it to review your own codebase for security issues? You hacker. Ban.

Anthropic simply can't be allowed to succeed. This is the most E Corp shit I've seen since I've been alive.

> Non Americans getting worse code?

This is a scary thought: tailoring quality based on user profile.

All of the above, and it hasn't just started now. It's been happening for several years at this point.
Can't you just switch the toggle that says "switch models when a message is flagged"? I turned mine off in case anything does get flagged I will know..

For now, I'm really not happy about this limited rollout and then turning off. That's probably the most egregious thing I think Anthropic has done recently