Last Week in AI: OpenAI files, Fable gets pulled, and sales evals

Hey there,

Busy week, lots to cover. Let's get into it.

• ​OpenAI submitted a confidential S-1. I assumed this would be the biggest news of the week. Anthropic filed last week. The race is on — if you're not first, you're last.
• ​Anthropic launched Fable (aka Mythos lite). tl;dr: it's a great model — very capable, expensive, but not too expensive (2x Opus in Runebench). We cleaned up a lot of tech debt in our few short sessions. But I did trip its safeguards, which aim to avoid cybersecurity and biotech prompts. Fable will flag these requests and downgrade them to Opus 4.8. At launch, Fable would also do a stealthy downgrade on any machine learning tasks, but Anthropic updated this to be an explicit denial after backlash from developers.
• ​US government issues export control directive over Fable. As a result, Anthropic abruptly disabled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all customers. Sad. There's still a lot of he said, she said going on here so we don't have the full story. What we know is the debate is over the safeguards and the ability to bypass them with a jailbreak. Hopefully we'll get Fable back soon.

Two updates from me:

1. ​Fable is great at coding, but pretty mid at sales. And it makes sense. Sales is somewhat non-verifiable and is not prioritized (which is why I made salesevals.com). Coding is where all the demand (and money) is right now, so these models will get better at coding. Unexpected, but GPT 5.4 high is still the best bang for your buck when it comes to sales coaching.
2. ​AI meets GTM. This is an old post from 2023, but I was debating with my brother how AI would impact job markets and kept coming back to this post. Read it alongside this post on developer efficiency and you'll have a good picture of the possibilities on the upside and the human nature inside orgs that will slow down AI rollout.

As for next week, it's busy. YC Demo Day on Tuesday. The Fed has its June FOMC meeting with a press conference on Wednesday. And last but definitely not least, the US and Iran will hopefully be signing a peace treaty on Friday which is sending markets higher during overnight trading.

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LFG,

Drew