We’ve reached the upper bound of AI.
Not in the sense that performance won’t improve. On the contrary, AI will improve AI.
But Anthropic’s Fable release has imposed a glass ceiling. How do you release the most powerful model in the world to everyone without destroying kingdoms?
Strong guardrails. It’s easy to trigger a gentle reminder of verboten topics : ask for a description of a plant cell or a detailed description of a modern large language model or question about software security.
But if we remain within the playground, Fable is the most powerful AI yet. Stripe compressed months of engineering into days : a 50-million-line Ruby codebase migrated in a single day, a refactor across tens of thousands of lines completed in 45 minutes.1
In my testing, Fable doubled inference performance on local models, besting the efforts of other state-of-the-art systems. Adding 10-15 percentage points on key benchmarks compared to typical improvements of 2 percentage points, Fable represents a genuine leap.2
We’re still understanding the best ways of using AI : techniques change every day. RAG, Plan/Act, Ralph Wiggum loops, /goals, structured prompting, MCP. How many fashions have we seen when the seasons of AI trends are measured in days?
Systems this powerful need to be phased in to allow the backbones of technology, banking, & energy to harden themselves in anticipation of increasingly powerful attacks.
The glass ceiling exists. It was inevitable for stability. It will rise over time, but for now there’s vast area underneath its curve.