There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

Also, thank you for sharing your experience. I recently joined that subreddit just to see what people are creating and I too have been unimpressed.

There's a lot to getting it right, and like all software, you have to built it for your target market. There's no easy AI solution to getting a fun and engaging core loop. Nor is there one for building the right level of complexity and balancing the learning curve.

I think a lot of people who can't/don't code see themselves as game designers and had thought that AI would let them make games, and are now finding it wasn't really about the code after all. That, and if you can't code, vibe coding alone isn't really good enough for much beyond flash-level games (yet).

I've done a lot of programming on various sub sections of the disciple and it still remains to me the hardest one to crack for AI.

It's undoubtedly am incredible tool for accelerating output but I think it's going to be the hardest for ai to commoditize as a whole.

It is always the creative world building part.

The main criticism of the Harry Potter books are not spelling or sentence structure, it is the plot holes and contradictions in the world build.

The same holds for software.

"Let's make a super mario 2D sidescrolling clone. I want the impulse, angular velocity, and gravity influencing the feeling of the jump to be configurable"

So you essentially design the parts that require detail while building up a custom engine

I give it an rough idea, or none and have it make a game.

See if there something here you enjoy to convince you I do think AI can slowly as they improve make more variety of lightweight 15 minute games.

https://4rc4de.com

Getting cutesie stylized 3D models is something that’s trivial with an RTX 5090, a ChatGPT pro subscription (unlimited image generation), you run Trellis2 plus a few other open source things in a pipeline that your agents can queue and it’s astonishing how much cool stuff comes out the other side. But the graphics don’t make the game fun at all, they’re just set dressing for the fun.

There’s been a lot of learning going from 0. “Okay, 3D model of a character. Oh, this model is useless since it isn’t in a T Pose I can’t rig it. What’s a rig? Okay, there’s a rigging ML model. Download that. Okay, how do I animate it? Oh, cool there’s a model for that. Oh wait my model has holes in it, that looks weird. Okay there’s an ultra shapes library that helps improve geometry. Whoops, that strips all the textures and shaders. Okay, trellis2 has a mode that takes an existing model and retextures it. Okay wow these look good, the characters are walking around! This goblin is break dancing! Okay uhh, what do you actually do in this game?”

Like it feels like that trap you can get stuck in when one part of something is trivially easy, so I have like 500 random 3D assets that are honestly pretty good looking for a game where the core gameplay loop is not developed at all because I have no idea what would make it feel fun. Because I can prompt and say “oh wouldn’t a Christmas village be cool?” And I wake up the next morning with 50 3D models of Christmas village stuff and characters and I say “wow, neat!” (It takes maybe 8 minutes end to end for the pipeline to generate one 3D model, so I just run it overnight). But then I have to manually place them in the world (if you let the AI do it in unreal engine 5 it places them via coordinates which become impossible to move inside the unreal editor).

The fun part is “wow, this is something I’m making with my kids, and it’s unique to us”. That’s what keeps me at it. I’ve never seen my kid so engrossed and excited to help me with something, she’s the one coming up with ideas and saying “what if we did this and that?” and then seeing those things become real is really neat. The bottleneck is there’s a dozen agents that can work on different parts of the game but it’s a chaotic mess.

Still, I’d imagine this is how people learn is by making something that’s a piece of junk then making something that’s better. I don’t plan on releasing my pieces of junk unless I feel like they’re actually fun.

But those games have already been designed a specific way, based on the developer's ideas and imagination and vision.

If you're the sort of person who always thinks along the lines of "I wish there was a way to upgrade spells" or "it would be great if you could open this door and see what is behind it" or "I hate the way orcs and goblins are friends, they should actually fight each other"

That has always been the issue with games: they capture the imagination... and then stop there. There's no way to expand them the way you want (except for submitting requests/wishes to the devs and hope they listen and add it in a short enough time period) and customization options are always very limited.

AI, on the other hand, empowers everyone to bring their own ideas to life. Sure, those ideas may not be great, or the execution may not be great, but at the end of the day it's a way to express one's imagination that would otherwise take years to do.

I assume only the weight of economic pressure and lack of alternatives (and plenty of opposition) kept the doors open, but the same "national interest and security" BS was trotted out then, too.

Big difference this time is nobody needs Fable/Mythos to accomplish anything. There is no magic line here, only improved connective work with less intervention. But it stands to reason that this will cause a huge chilling effect on AI development in the U.S. if it stands and other labs will eventually bypass Fable/Mythos in capability.

To use a car analogy, the models are being built like engine improvements, sometimes going from V6 to V8, but other orgs might improve the car's wind resistance or fuel injection, which leads to a similar speed improvements. There is a lot of space for improvements all along the chain which is why this is such a pointless move.

Knowing this administration (and Anthropic's ham-fisted tactics) this ends in a week or less with some sort of "deal" and was all part of some high stakes negotiation. Possibly even beneficial to Anthropic, because where does it leave OpenAI once they settle on some sweetheart deal? The precedent is set.

Most nerds (like myself) outgrew this edgy mentality in highschool/college. Realistically this mentality just makes it impossible to see anything except through the darkest possible lens.

The Claude.ai web prompt has an undismissable "Claude Fable 5 is current unavailable" notice.

I'm not saying it's 100% a stunt.

But...Anthropic really wants you to know about it.

- Anthropic is just doing this for marketing stunt

- AI is like NFT's

- circular deals

- the bubble will burst anytime soon

- the hype bro's are propping up the stock market so that they can exit quick like grifters

(I just made the last one up to force terminology they use)

This is really distracting because the main problem here is that AI is getting too powerful to be just handed out to normal people like us. If you still believe it is all hype, you are getting distracted from the real problem.

I'm guessing at some point this kind of rhetoric will die away and we focus on real problem

There simply won't be jobs for them.

The risk is that all of these very incredibly smart and disgruntled people decide to do something about it. Elite overproduction, but instead as a result of enormous shift in supply side economics.

What’s so funny is that same people are the ones that identify themselves as liberals as long as they can keep their privileged, highly paid jobs.

From the original 2019 release:

> We can also imagine the application of these models for malicious purposes , including the following (or other applications we can’t yet anticipate):

    Generate misleading news articles
    Impersonate others online
    Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media
    Automate the production of spam/phishing content

These worries are why they stated they were cautious in rolling it out

https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/

Important safety features ("do not generate child porn", "statements should be factual or backed by evidence") were simply not part of the design of these systems and have yet to truly solved to this day, but AI companies decided to release these technologies onto the general public regardless of their glaring flaws.

I like AI for its shitposting capabilities and its neat parlour tricks, but I also believe so far it has been a net negative for everyone but the richest minority of society who benefits from firing people and having computers do half their jobs badly. It's too late now, but in hindsight I do agree that these systems were too dangerous to release in this shape.

Given everything else this administration has done, you now decide to accept their stated intentions at face value?

But it's also, as sibling comments mentioned, a bend-the-knee between Government and Anthropic. Once OpenAI catches up, and Anthropic lawyers-up as well, it will probably be reversed or morphed into a "models must have the US seal of AI-approval and, therefore and hereafter, we AI-approve the new US-verified Fable 5.1" - which will coincide with a at-large deployment at the DoD, Pentagon, and friends.

Otherwise the Chinese will catch-up and, heavens forbid!

The much-decried EU AI Act provides a safe, predictable regulatory framework to base ones AI development on. It provides legal stability compared to unpredictable arbitrary decisions by the US executive.

If AI companies have any sort of sense in them, they'd be well-advised to consider relocating to Europe.

Pretty wild statement given the "Pathological liar" chat around the OAI leader

Have you seen what people do to their own family members over inheritances? You “trust” OpenAI?

“Who's being naive, Kay?” - God Father

(I noted the same thing a few weeks back, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48341224 but his recent blogposts should make it crystal clear if there was any lingering doubt).

That's not what's going on. But, what's going on has always been possible. Even to this day, there's software that's is subject to export controls. There's also an often-changing list of countries that US-based companies are prohibited from doing any business with. For software, this has been going on since the 1990s. "Weirdly", the US-based software business has been doing really well.

Anthropic was instructed to prevent Foreign Nationals from using a subset of their software. Anthropic chose to prevent everyone from using that subset of their software.

Anthropic had other options. One of those options was to gate access to the software behind the ID, biometrics, and -if present- passport capture that Big Tech seems to be very excited to do. I expect that -if they end up changing anything at all about access control- we'll see them doing something very similar to that in the coming weeks.

ChatGPT was released 4 years ago and still out of 27 countries in EU, only Mistral based in France has a model closer to a frontiers and IMO EU has already lost the race and still trying to catch up to yesterday models.

Mistral might be a bit behind but this might give them a lot more business.

Most of all, a lot more people will switch to Chinese models. They will catchup, soon enough.

I have not had much of a chance to try Fable, but it did not seem better than Opus for what I tried it out on. Maybe its better on bigger jobs/vibe coding type tasks which is not something I do anyway.

Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad!

This is structurally the same fallacy as "people shouldn't be allowed to do anything, because some people are bad!".

You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.

It is an extreme edge case and the argument for a sane government oversight is still perfectly valid. No oversight makes corporations dump waste into the water supply and market asbestos-lined cigarettes. It's naive to think that no oversight is needed.

Government is fine if it’s done by people that aren’t in it only for themselves. Actually it is often still fine if it’s done by people only in it for themselves. It’s just that the people in it right now will burn the world down to enrich themselves.

When you give a government power, there are people in place who can and will abuse that power. If not now, then next year, or in five years. After all, power granted to the government rarely goes away.

This is the reason that you should always consider the worst case, when governments gain power. The power to ban a specific technology? What could go wrong? How could that be abused? Let me count the ways...

I believe the real lesson is that we need to fix government. Too many things that people assumed to be codified were actually only ever enforced by social contract.

Until now, we've largely operated within a band of norms that served us fairly well, if imperfectly.

However, we're now seeing what's possible when the social contract is shattered. We need to codify in ways that insulate government from wide variances in the reasonable operation of our form of government. And, we need to root out regulatory capture while we're at it.

Government involvement should be the people's voice. We need to restore that in earnest versus eliminate government involvement; else we're merely a corporatocracy.

“It’s not always going to be the (oligo|mono)polistic corporation you personally wanted” either.

So we invent democracy, term limits, anti-trust, branches of government, environmental safety regulations, the SEC etc. etc.

Whether in the public or private sphere we have created social technologies to make power more diffuse and constrained, and corruption and misalignment less likely (never impossible).

One feature of the last decade is the steady erosion of these safety rails.

But of course Anthropic has been lobbying hard for this, for government regulation, and finally they've (at least temporarily) got what they want. Maybe they are actually happy with the outcome, who knows. They get to IPO and all get rich, they get to sell current level models, and future development gets heavily regulated.

It was always going to happen anyway - just a matter of time. At some point (whether that is today is beside the point) AI/AGI will become powerful enough to have national security implications and of course the government is going to regulate who can have access or not, put in place export controls, require clearance for developers, etc.

It's perfectly reasonable to want government involvement that for sane governments is OK, even when you don't like that government. The current US government is a completely insane outlier. You cannot expect everything to adjust for the most insane outlier.

That is not the problem with government involvement, it is the problem with bad governments.

Like, in the US, Trump might do the ICE show for his voters, but Obama's deportated 3 million just fine in his time.

Government intervention is good and useful and keeps a markets free and society fair, preventing things like monopolies, robber barons and insider trading.

When those constraints are removed, when government becomes the source of corruption, we end up wheee the US has arrived today - where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment and the law is used selectively as a weapon.

This is a very dangerous moment for the US.

The whole point of government control is at least everyone has some say in it, if we build the government decently. It has to be controlled by one or more human institutions, so choose your poison: government, nonprofits, forprofits, ... ?

I've pointed this out so many times when enforced DEI and cancellation culture was rife, and was asked, basically, why I wanted to be a nazi :-/

Sure, there are some differences and it’s not as scripted, just like how professional sports is not as scripted as WWE or other things people see in their rectangle called a phone/tv (even though people still debate, e.g., which super hero is better), but it’s still controlled by an overarching control harness.

It’s why regardless of voting or party in power, we always get the sane direction of movement even if one is flavored blue and another time it’s flavored red or the March forward has a left or right lean. Just like the manipulation of emotions in WWE or and soap opera drama, the manipulation works best when there’s cycles of tension and conflict to move people. That’s how narcissistic manipulators work.

It’s one of the ways in which you can tell they’re behind it all when you can take a step back and realize that there’s always this tension and constant conflict and drama, but somehow everything always works out in the narcissist’s interest and desired direction. It’s insidious.

Grok and ChatGpT are more in line with the narcissistic system’s interest of world domination by a cabal of psychopathic and extremely narcissistic and supremacist people … so Anthropic that may not want to participate in murder and mayhem and could be used by people who oppose murder, mayhem, and world domination needs to be kneecapped … ideally into submission. That’s all that this is, the constant evil that controls America doing what it has always done, rapaciously consume and abuse.

[1] https://stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/files/2022/09/Hertel-Fernand...

so instead of involvment proper there is leverage somebody tries to pass onto competitors

Courts have slapped down some of Trump's actions thankfully, but a lot of what he has done that many disagree with simply shouldn't be legal and only are because in the past we had what may have been good reason to solve a short term problem.

Trump shouldn't have been legally allowed to enact a war without congressional approval before it began. As it stands he was able to sneak through with the war powers act, congress is completely unwilling to enforce their own oversight authority, and Trump eventually redefined how to interpret the war powers act and again congress rolled their eyes and didn't challenge it.

This is laughable “both parties are as bad” thinking. By reasonable standards your current government has gone through involvement, passed straight through tampering and is now into nation-destruction mode. It’s a new thing for the rest of the world to see.

We've seen how social media sites have always been in contention with govs regarding free speech even tho theyre fundamentally a way for other people to socialize with one another

We've seen this movie before with crypto export bans in the 90s. The rest of the world caught up and then surpassed the US very quickly - and that was without the enormous financial incentives of AI.

I have the opposite impression using Fable, behavior-wise it is much more polished than Opus 4.7 was at launch.

> Speaking of the HN/Reddit folks, lots of people are gleefully cackling about how Anthropic got what they deserved for their ‘marketing stunt’ with Mythos. As I’ve said before, this isn’t the first time we’ve had an AI CEO argue that something is ‘unsafe’ for personal gain.

Do you not think it is time to give up the whole "it is hype" rhetoric and come to reality -- the models can actually be unsafe and naturally Fable is closed off and the government is pulling access.

On Enterprise you might end up saving money if the other harness is more efficient.

Why would the makers of open models (mostly Chinese firms) continue to open them up, now that the value chain and economy shifts? Previously, it was a (Chinese) national goal to force the market to compress OpenAI/Anthropic margins (and compressing their revenue along the way), to ensure the Chinese had access to high quality models, and could afford to compete. Now there is an opportunity to usurp and be the international default, and claim the margin for themselves by closing their models.

Beyond that, there is likely an upper bound of capability-per-parameter, which means that there is an upper bound on "local" models, and once you need the cloud, why would the government not target clouds next?

If that happens, presumably the weights eventually make their way online...

Such as?

With respect to AI capabilities is it really?

I don't see anyone else producing frontier closed source LLM's or frontier open source LLM's outside of US and China.

Well, yes but it also took questionable legality and a massive pile of cash to get there. OpenAI has raised $180b and Anthropic $132b

Don't forget that US and China are the only 2 countries with chips to train and run the models.

- Staying alive

- Keeping our jobs

?

The Mythos marketing strategy in action

So much smoke, mirrors and SV techbro bullshit going around that it has become impossible to figure out what's what.