LessWrong posts by zvi

Fable remains in limbo, with renewed hope that we will get it back soon (45% by tomorrow, 69% by July 1, nice.) The full capabilities post is now available.

Alex Bores unfortunately lost narrowly in NY-12, and will not be heading to Congress.

There are also plenty of other stories to cover. Some highlights:


GLM-5.2 is the new best open model, although it is expensive for its class. It will have its uses, potentially for agents you need to run fully locally or privately, but often it won’t be the right fit.

Claude Tag is a new system for having Claude join your Slack, and if you @ him then he will spin up an instance to do the coding work.

Dean Ball is joining OpenAI to work on policy. We don’t see eye to eye on everything, but this is a huge upgrade over their existing alternatives.

The debate over the MidJourney scanner continues.

Table of Contents


Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. You know what it is for.

Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Hiring French Qwants.

Huh, Upgrades. Claude Code supports artifacts.

[...]
---
Outline:
(01:12) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility
(02:58) Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility
(03:13) Huh, Upgrades
(03:38) On Your Marks
(04:36) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon
(11:20) Fun With Media Generation
(12:20) Cyber Lack of Security
(14:49) Overcoming Bias
(15:52) A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
(18:14) They Took Our Jobs
(19:48) Get Involved
(21:54) Introducing
(22:12) Claude Tag
(31:46) In Other AI News
(33:20) More On GLM-5.2
(35:17) ChatGPT Health
(37:04) Middle Of The Journey
(51:04) New Medical Diagnostic Just Dropped
(54:05) Google on AI Control
(01:02:12) The Once And Future Fable
(01:04:17) Fable: The First Lawsuit
(01:05:12) Dean Ball Joins OpenAI
(01:09:03) Show Me the Money
(01:09:18) Quiet Speculations
(01:12:00) Alex Bores Loses In NY-12 By 4%
(01:22:28) The Quest for Sane Regulations
(01:24:49) Chip City
(01:28:33) The Week in Audio
(01:29:21) People Just Say Things
(01:30:19) Rhetorical Innovation
(01:36:32) There Are Two Pills
(01:37:55) Who Evals The Evals
(01:39:02) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult
(01:43:17) Cooperative Alignment
(01:44:22) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:45:59) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone
(01:48:08) The Lighter Side
---

First published:

June 25th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MfdaizeH8z8civPHe/ai-174-you-re-it

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

It does look good, actually.

After the odds had dropped quite a bit, they’re looking good again, with a 60% chance of restoration by July 1 and 88% by July 31, in the wake of groundwork looking like it is being laid in various places:

leo: BREAKING: Claude Code v2.1.190 introduces several string changes that hint at preparations for a Fable 5 return, with it being permanently included in subscriptions with weekly usage.

The string “You’ve used your Fable 5 usage for this week” has been added, and “purchased separately from your plan” has been removed

leo: UPDATE: Fable 5 has now reportedly also reappeared in Amazon Bedrock

If the update is based purely on the above info I would treat the new odds as overconfident. These moves seem reasonable to make even if you have no confidence in the restoration, in order to be ready if that moment arrives.

This also suggests a potential permanent quota for Fable for subscribers. Even a modest amount is a big game here, since even a modest allocation means you can use it for non-coding tasks or minor coding tasks within the subscription.

With that [...]
---
Outline:
(01:42) A Rather Terrible Policy
(03:14) The People Have Spoken
(03:59) Thank You, Next
(06:35) Be Very Very Quiet
(07:18) What These Babies Can And Cannot Do
(13:54) What's The Worst That Could Happen?
(25:09) The Data Retention Policy Is About Defense In Depth
(25:51) Pick Up The Phone
(28:49) People Just Say Things
---

First published:

June 24th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xJMngE34AfwGWvKLx/the-once-and-future-fable-4

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Your monthly hit of all the things that are fit to print without a better place to live.

Today is election day here in New York City, so again a reminder that if you are a registered Democrat and live in NY-12 today is the final day to vote for Alex Bores for Congress, and as per my argument yesterday that this matters a lot for ensuring we have a sensible Congressional response to AI.

RIP FiveThirtyEight

ABC and Disney completely take down FiveThirtyEight and all its articles, after telling Nate Silver they would refuse to sell it to him at any price because Nate had criticized their management of the brand. Nate Silver took this opportunity to reminisce and tell some stories about the old website, and the reasons the path of not seeking revenue and working with an entity too big to care ultimately doomed them.

‘What a bunch of assholes,’ indeed. I can grudgingly accept this sort of thing when it maximizes profits and the amount is meaningful, but this is different.

Jack: This sort of digital arson is so frustrating. Pretty sure Dante had a place in mind for rights-holders [...]
---
Outline:
(00:33) RIP FiveThirtyEight
(01:31) RIP Books
(02:18) Bad News
(09:53) Good Advice
(18:31) Opportunity Knocks
(19:15) Lower Awareness
(22:21) The New York Times Has Some Issues
(22:47) Liar Liar
(25:51) Conspiracy Theory
(26:16) Good News, Everyone
(26:31) For Your Entertainment
(28:00) A Matter of Taste
(35:21) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
(37:33) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
(38:38) Sports Go Sports
(39:09) Government Working
(42:03) Jones Act Watch
(43:02) Humans Can Be Strategic
(44:58) Variously Effective Altruism
(46:14) Support Anti-Aging Research
(47:25) The Lighter Side
---

First published:

June 23rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Taa4zmSNtD5S99tJT/monthly-roundup-43-june-2026

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

GLM-5.2 arrived last week. It boasts excellent benchmarks and looks strong.

Benchmarks here are a de facto ceiling of how good it is, not a point estimate. Essentially all other aspects of an open model like this, beyond speed and price, will almost always be worse than the numbers suggest. Still, impressive.

It is definitely a large step up from GLM-5.1, and likely the strongest open model.

GLM-5.2 is still substantially behind the absolute frontier, although plausibly on the cost-benefit Pareto frontier. It seems closer to the frontier than previous efforts, including probably closer than DeepSeek R1 was during the DeepSeek moment.

This is the new ‘peak close behind’ moment. Its existence is a substantial updates to push back some of the ‘where are all the updates’ updates in the opposite direction over time.

Purely in terms of core tasks that GLM-5.2 is capable of doing, and ignoring missing features and its inferior generalization, and ignoring that it is distilled from Claude, and ignoring the Mythos class of models, and marking purely from date of public release, you can make a case GLM-5.2 is somewhere between 4 months and 7 months behind the frontier [...]
---
Outline:
(02:01) Alex Bores For Congress In NY-12
(03:41) Signs of Life
(05:05) The Benchmarks
(09:02) GLM-5.2 Is Distilled From Claude
(09:55) Positive Responses
(16:00) Finding The Niche
(17:30) Negative Reactions
(20:05) Looking To The Future
---

First published:

June 22nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reXkwJbB8GYdeuvDt/glm-5-2-is-the-new-best-open-model

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Only three days after the release of Claude Fable 5, Anthropic was forced by the United States Government to make it unavailable, when a jailbreak was brought to its attention, rather than the previous situation of ‘yes obviously experts can jailbreak anything if they care enough’ and ‘yes obviously you can ask Fable to fix your code.’

Three days was enough time for many of us to learn to love Fable, and for us to dearly miss it now that it is gone. The world was briefly smarter, and now it is again stupider. At some point it will get smarter again, which will likely be within two weeks.

This post is written as if Fable 5 is again available for public use, rather than trying to include a lot of qualifying clauses. It remains to be seen how this will play out, and this post does not attempt to cover that question.

My previous release coverage of Fable covered the model card and then model welfare. Coverage of the government takedown of Fable starts here, and continues here and here.

The Official Pitch

The pitch is that Fable 5 is the best model [...]
---
Outline:
(01:08) The Official Pitch
(04:06) Technical Details
(04:31) The System Prompt and Jailbreak
(06:45) Benchmarks
(15:22) Other People's Benchmarks
(21:08) The Classifiers Are Not Messing Around
(22:53) The Classifiers Need Work
(28:15) The Classifiers Have Consequences
(29:18) First Hit Is Free
(29:53) How Easily We Forget
(30:46) Data Retention Is An Issue
(31:15) Fable For The Win
(36:15) Andrej Karpathy Is Impressed
(37:54) Every Is Very Impressed
(39:04) Other People Are Impressed
(51:10) Know How To Tell a Fable
(53:06) You Can Just Make Things
(55:37) You Can Just Install Things
(56:05) Good Personality
(57:51) Fable Writes A Fable
(01:06:04) Is That Code
(01:08:32) Fable Crosses The Threshold
(01:09:12) Man With A Plan
(01:10:12) Less Impressed Assessments
(01:13:39) Actively Negative Assessments
(01:14:16) Coherence
(01:15:27) Good Night And Good Luck
(01:16:05) Curious Fable
(01:16:23) I See You, Baby
(01:16:40) We Finally Did It We Know How To Count Letters
(01:17:46) That's Not My Style
(01:20:12) The Lighter Side
---

First published:

June 19th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kMnobCQp9z2pSbzDB/claude-fable-5-and-mythos-5-capabilities

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.