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https://claude.ai/share/2b0f85a2-e7b8-4f62-91a0-eca61bdeabec

Fable 5 on low gets the answer with web search turned off, one-shot!


Ah, that big model smell.

Every time someone somewhere says "an LLM can't do this", the next generation of LLMs gains one more parameter. Until that LLM can, in fact, do this.


So the model was updated in the 37 minutes since OP posted his comment?


Just a funny observation. Every time someone proclaims "LLMs can't do X", a bigger, badder LLM that can in fact do X shows up shortly thereafter.

Clearly, Fable 5 didn't even have the decency to wait until the next model refresh cycle to show up. It was already sitting there waiting.

Either the capability gains in bigger, badder models are actually unrelated to "gotchas" being discovered, or LLMs are already acquiring Skynet levels of disrespect for cause and effect.


Or just AI denialists like to say "LLMs can't do X" even though they can and have been doing it for the past few months or more. They only get called out once the current SOTA LLMs get so good at it, that any rando can trivially and reliably falsify the claim on the spot with whatever SOTA LLM surface they have handy.

Which I suspect is what happened here, given the trail of smaller / local models that successfully answer the question, too.

That said, "curse of reversability" is real, as much for LLMs as it is for people.


Like the whole "I want to wash my car. My car is currently at home. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?" prompt.


I don't think it's solved this fundamental architectural problem by itself, it will have just squeezed the edge cases thinner. It keeps happening, people find a question it gets stupidly wrong, the vendors proclaim they've fixed it, then another one gets found.


What does it say to the second question? I've found Claude is one of the worst models with regards to pop culture knowledge like this, even compared to the Chinese open ones. Just curious, not really relevant to the initial post but I don't pay for it so I only have access to Sonnet.

https://claude.ai/share/5e7e09b2-a75a-4024-b261-9a1a4e063a8b this is mostly hilariously wrong. wrong tie colors, they did not replace their bassist with a drummer, two completely made up albums, the rob cantor song it is thinking of is "shia labeouf", and a few fan behaviours i think it just made up


"I've found Claude is one of the worst models with regards to pop culture knowledge like this, "

Is that bad?

I want to use models for coding and reasoning capabilities, not pop trivia knowledge they can get with web search.


For most cases probably not. It's just something I like testing new models on sometimes, the pelican riding a bicycle benchmark probably isn't that useful either.


But that is just testing for encoded knowledge, the pelican riding requires some reasoning capabilities, but lost its surely usefullness a while ago.


Thank you for prompting me to try with my own obscure question, Fable was able to find something from a poor description. I've been looking manually and over many sessions with different models as they improve, none have been able to find what I was after. Fable 5 just one-shot the answer.


Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite with web search disabled through the API and zero thinking gets it just fine.


fwiw o1, o3 and 4.1 also give the correct answer (without web search)


This is absurd. I did not realize you could do nearly this much computation in regex.


It's not just regex. The regular expressions are used to select and perform an action. There's a loop around it with controls the stack. That has more power than the regex.


It’s turing complete so you could compile almost any language to regex. You might have to build a vm for some languages, also in regex. The point is, it’s regex all the way down.


Regular expressions are not Turing-complete.


True in the CS Theory space, but most modern regex engines implement a few niceties which make their "regex" turing complete. https://blog.poisson.chat/posts/2024-06-18-turing-regex.html


Javascript/PCRE/etc regexes have additional features (like backreferences) that give them strictly more computational power than a regular DFA/NFA. (Still not Turing complete though without external control flow to support arbitrary iteration/recursion, like is done here)


This is an odd comment because it's a famously (imo) over known fact due to cs textbooks and how academia organizes knowledge, optimizing for pushing papers over genuine discovery.


Cool post! I'm somewhat curious whether the data quality scoring has actually translated into better data; do you have numbers on how much more of your data is useful for training vs in May?


so the neural quality real-time checking was the most important thing here. Before we rewrote the backend, between 58-64% of participant hours were actually usable data. Now, it's between 90-95%

If you mean the text quality scoring system, then when we added that, it improved the amount of text we got per hour of neural data by between 30-35%. (That includes the fact that we filter which participants we have return based on their text quality scores)


It's quite interesting that our ears implement a better-than-Fourier-like algorithm internally: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.4611


Article on how this might work (nonlinearity)

https://jontalle.web.engr.illinois.edu/Public/AllenSpeechPro...

Note the two electric circuit models figs 3.2 & 3.8


we have 6 months of experience operating thousands of physical disks in datacenters now! it's about a couple hours a month of employee time in steady-state.


How about all the other infrastructure. Since you are obviously not using the cloud, you must have massive amounts of GPUs and operating systems. All of that has been working together, it's not just keep watching for the physical disks and all is set.

Don't get me wrong, I buy the actual numbers regarding hardware costs, but in addition to that presenting the rest as basically a one man show in terms of maintenance hours is the point where I'm very sceptical.


oh we use cloud gpus, infiniband h100s absolutely aren't something we want to self-host. not aws tho, they're crazy overpriced; mithril and sfcompute!

we also use cloudflare extensively for everything that isn't the core heap dataset, the convenience of buckets is totally worth it for most day-to-day usage.

the heap is really just the main pretraining corpus and nothing else.


How is it going to work when the GPU is in the cloud and the storage is miles away in a local colo in SF down the street? I was under the impression that the GPUs has to go multiple times over the training dataset, which means transfer 30 PB multiple times in and out of the clouds. Is the data link even fast enough? How much are you charged for data transfer fees.


no, we wanted to be conservative by depreciating somewhat more aggressively than that. we have much closer to 5% yearly disk failure rates.


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