[visarga]

Right now I tried "What is digestion?" -> "Fable 5's safeguards flagged this message. Our intentionally broad safeguards deliver more capabilities but can also flag safe coding, cybersecurity, and biology tasks. Send feedback or learn more."

I don't think you can 100% ensure your queries have absolutely no biology and cyber keywords inside. No matter how harmless, they always trigger. People complain Fable aborts even when they try to make a login page for showing "username" and "password".

This makes models like Fable 5 impossible to use in any serious agentic task, because you can't even guarantee the model, which is a basic thing you need to build on.

[ben_w]

> I don't think you can 100% ensure your queries have absolutely no biology and cyber keywords inside.

Obviously. Almost everything is a precursor to something dangerous, to the extent that if some model isn't aware of the risk it will wander into it blindly, e.g. suggesting leaving raw garlic and olive oil alone for a week without awareness this will likely breed botulism bacteria.

> This makes models like Fable 5 impossible to use in any serious agentic task, because you can't even guarantee the model, which is a basic thing you need to build on.

This is binary thinking: "100% ensure", "impossible to use", "can't even guarantee the model".

Outside computers, most work is not binary, it's probability, e.g. "this skyscraper will probably survive being hit by an aircraft; oh we didn't mean a 747 we meant a small Cessna, but what's the chances of a 747 crashing into it soon after takeoff?".

Fable being too cautious for its own good (especially since the other models were not) is a fair criticism, but this isn't a binary question.

[Teever]

> I don't think you can 100% ensure your queries have absolutely no biology and cyber keywords inside.

I’m pretty sure that I encountered this the other day. I gave it a copy of a paper by biologist Michael Levin and mentioned off hand that it should be much easier to replicate that his other work (because most of his work is biological lab work and this paper was about sorting algorithms) and it immediately told me that I couldn’t use Fable for this.

This just isn’t feasible. These jackasses spent the last few years telling the world that their products are going to destroy the world to make them seem edgy and to justify regulations that benefit the entrenched players and now they’re going to be the ones to decide what we do with this technology?

History is going to look back at this time and how we let such foolishly inconsistent people make such grand choices for everyone poorly.

[chrisjj]

> we let such foolishly inconsistent people make such grand choices for everyone poorly.

Who could you get to work on this inherently bullsh*t tech, but inherent bullsh*tters?

[pixl97]

>History is going to look back at this time and how we let such foolishly inconsistent people make such grand choices for everyone poorly

So pretty much like all of history before this point.

[ben_w]

> History is going to look back at this time and how we let such foolishly inconsistent people make such grand choices for everyone poorly.

Assuming we have a future history. We've already got "history slop" with AI rewriting the past by their incompetence.

Given they're "such foolishly inconsistent people", would you rather they err on the side of caution like this? Or the side of boldness, like Musk has been doing with FSD/Autopilot or Grok porn, all of which he's getting in legal trouble over?

I distrust Musk and Zuckerberg (to put it mildly), so it's fair if you say you don't believe anyone's public statements; but I also hang out with some of the researchers on this, and a fear of e.g. ending up with something as criminally unhinged in cyber-work as Grok was with porn is the least of their worries. Plenty of them also fear a corporation centralising power with such tools (such power is Musk's entire sales pitch for why line go up in future).

[chrisjj]

> Our intentionally broad safeguards deliver more capabilities

Oh? How, exactly?

[b112]

Because without them, a President which threatens to invade Canada, Greenland, a President which is the most market interventionist president ever (yet mysteriously a Republican), might be upset because his mobster like need to control, threaten, manipulate, and belittle everyone who doesn't bend a knee...

Has signed presidential orders against them preventing them from doing business as usual.

They probably should change that, and it is corproate speak, but I read it as:

"Our (forced by presidential order or otherwise we couldn't offer you this model at all) broad safeguards (now allow us) to deliver more capabilities.

There's lots to complain about with some of these companies. But let's pile on where it's deserved.

[jdiff]

Weren't these obnoxious safeguards in place from Day 1, before political meddling in the most holy Free Market took place?

[pixl97]

I mean, do you let your employees commit crimes when interacting with your customers? Safeguards aren't a binary switch, when models start saying wild shit people tend to get up in arms quickly.

Though at this point the safeguards are making the product useless.

[jdiff]

I was objecting more narrowly to the notion that the driving force behind the obnoxious safeguards that are making the product useless was the current admin, rather than having been in there since launch and driven internally.

[b112]

There are always going to be safeguards. If not, people call you a child pornographer (grok). But you're referring to 'obnoxious' safeguards. Ones that seem excessive, and dumb.

In that context, I'd say probably the current admin is indeed the cause of that. They certainly claim to be. And they used the full power of the federal government along with interventionist policies and, it would seem, a gangster like mentality to punish those they disagree with.

So would it be as obnoxious otherwise? I don't think so. And there would have to be guardrails regardless, or apparently anything the tool is used for is considered what you support and want. So can you imagine a platform with no guardrails?