Wow. This model is so good, and we have GLM 5.3 (seems great voor security related work) and Deepseek. In a few months we'll have Fable/Sol-like capabilities that are not coming from the big US companies. I feel as a programmer that that is more than enough. How wil OpenAI and Anthropic survive when frontier model intelligence becomes commoditized?
I stopped using Fable and Opus 5 because I literally can't understand the output. The waffle is so intense it no longer makes sense. I don't understand who is using those to get real work done.
I'm using kimi-k3 on a real high level dev & analysis task at the moment (with Gemini flash for fast implementation) and it is fantastic.
I think we have passed the point where frontier intelligence is commoditized.
just curious; which fable/opus versions are you using?
Fable-1m-max-thinking output, despite being incredibly slow and expensive, feels like it bucked a trend towards superficial loquaciousness in their models that had been building since 4.6.
I'm a bit of a luddite when it comes to upgrading models, fable was the first one to make me give up Opus 4.6-1M-max.
just need to give it clear direction, guide it about how to properly use hooks / preserve decomp code, rewrite all the comments, go back & redo things when it spits out some ugly hack, ...
but this does save time, especially considering this is working with decomp code where many functions are random hex addresses
The idea that there is much more computation (and intelligence/agency) going on in biological and other systems seems to be getting more popular. (The author writes: The whole body is a computer: it’d be wasteful for evolution to only use the brain for computation when other systems could take part too.). Michael Levin has some super interesting ideas about this.
GabeN mentions similar in a video with IGN a few years ago.
Machine brain interfaces can reliably model thought to action of using ones arm, for example.
But it cannot model "feeling". It's, as of that interview, an intractable problem to map all electrical activity in us given external stimuli. Every body "feels" a cold stimulus in a different part of their. This wasn't qualitative either; imaging technology shows activity unevenly occurs across every human body. Put an ice cube on someones hand, their left knee tissues may react. Put ice cube on another person's hand, back of their neck reacts not their left knee.
Then there are stories of people missing the majority of their brain but only learned this medically after living a normal life; going to college, holding a career together for a couple decades.
Brain-centrism was just as dumb as our other takes that attempt to demarcate a center to our center-less universe. Even just practically speaking, I know a lot of PhDs who cannot cook or rotate a tire. Where is the intelligence in letting oneself end up such a helpless, and thus codependent, tool?
I've been dealing with chronic pain in my hands, arms, and shoulders, and one of the things I've slowly been figuring out is that the pain I feel in my hand is actually coming from tight muscles in my forearm. Referred pain is weird.
There's a conversation on YouTube between Mike Johnson (whose theory is the subject of the article) and Michael Levin. Levin's work has been a huge inspiration ... for everyone working between biology, psychology, and spirituality.
> it’d be wasteful for evolution to only use the brain for computation
Even what we consciously experience as the brain is really only a tiny part of the brain.
The little language centre and the capacity to imagine are only a tiny subset of a multitude of brain functions and yet we believe that those two functions make up “me”. Actually it’s just those two functions telling a story that they are me.
I think the difference now is that traditional software ultimately comes down to a long series of if/then statements (also the old AI's like Wolfram), whereas the new AI (mainly LLM's) have a fundamentally different approach.
Look into something like Prolog (~50 years old) to see how systems can be built from rules rather than it/else statements. It wasn't all imperative programming before LLMs.
If you mean that it all breaks down to if/else at some level then, yeah, but that goes for LLMs too. LLMs aren't the quantum leap people seem to think they are.
Yeah, the result is pretty cool. It's probably how it felt to eat pizza for the first time. People had been grinding grass seeds into flour, mixing with water and putting it on hot stones for millennia. Meanwhile others had been boiling fruits into pulp and figuring out how to make milk curdle in just the right way. Bring all of that together and, boom, you have the most popular food in the world.
We're still at the stage of eating pizza for the first time. It'll take a little while to remember that you can do other things with bread and wheat, or even other foods entirely.
Firstly it can render environments in detail. I'm (mostly) aphantasic even in dreams, so this wasn't obvious to me. But most people literally get visual renderings in their mind.
Secondly, it's fairly clear now that our sensory inputs are not being experienced as sensory inputs. We experience a reconstruction. Obvious basic sign of this is that we fill in the gap in vision where the optic nerve is. But generally, we're making an integrated world model all the time out of the senses, and are conscious of that world model.
You're right though, both the above are rendering the experience and can take shortcuts for that. It's sufficiently detailed in each case though that it kinda is rendering the world too, in some sense.
I guess I mean that we are awake experience the input from our senses, and that in a dream only the replication of the experience of seeing or hearing etc. is needed, not a replication of the input of the senses which then leads to the experience.
