Fable 5 suspended three days after launch
Claude has started improving itself
This marks the most surreal 72 hours
in the history of AI.
On June 9th,
Anthropic released a new model
called Fable 5.
It was the most powerful brain
they had ever made available to the public.
As a paid user myself,
I had a workflow I'd been stuck on for days.
I gave it a mess of disorganized thoughts,
and it mapped out a full plan in minutes.
It even flagged several pitfalls
that hadn't even crossed my mind.
That feeling...
it was like driving a family car
and suddenly being tossed into a fighter jet cockpit,
surrounded by incomprehensible yet terrifyingly powerful buttons.
Then,
three days later,
on the afternoon of June 12th,
it was gone.
Not a crash,
not maintenance.
The US government issued an order.
That night, Anthropic shut it down,
along with its even more formidable sibling,
shutting them both off completely.
Access was cut for all global users.
Those of us outside the US
were overnight
escorted right out of that fighter jet.
Hello,
everyone.
I'm Wang Lijie.
What I want to talk about today
isn't the political gossip behind this suspension.
What I really want to discuss
is what's hidden within those 72 hours.
A truth more accurate than 'the Singularity'
and far more chilling.
Let's talk about 'the Singularity' first.
For years,
whenever AI is discussed,
people imagine a sci-fi scene: one day,
machines suddenly 'wake up.'
With a bang,
an intelligence explosion happens,
and the world is turned upside down.
We're all waiting for that moment,
that definitive turning point.
But Anthropic's founder,
Dario Amodei,
recently said in a long interview:
'You're all wrong.'
There is no single moment.
He used a precise metaphor
that left me stunned for a long time.
He said,
imagine you're on a spaceship
traveling away from Earth at near-light speed.
According to relativity,
time slows down.
You wake up from a nap,
and two days have passed on Earth.
So, in one day,
you have to process two days of Earth's events.
But the ship is still accelerating.
After another nap,
three more days have passed on Earth.
The next nap,
four days.
You are constantly accelerating.
The world around you
rushes toward you
at an ever-increasing pace.
This is what Dario says he feels every day.
It's not a sudden explosion one day,
but a smooth, quiet, yet increasingly steep exponential curve.
He calls this a "smooth exponential."
This hides a deep blind spot in human cognition.
Our brains
evolved on the grasslands.
They are hardwired to make linear predictions.
One step today,
one step tomorrow,
probably one step the day after.
But exponentials don't work like that.
An exponential is one step today,
two steps tomorrow,
four steps the day after.
For a long time at the beginning,
it stays so flat you barely notice any change.
It makes you think, "That's all there is to it."
Then,
at a corner when you're least prepared,
it suddenly shoots straight up.
We can't perceive exponentials.
It's not a knowledge problem;
it's a hardware problem.
Our brains
were never designed for an exponential age.
Think back on how you've felt these past two years.
Don't you often feel that after a few months of not paying attention,
you look back and find
AI can already code and diagnose illnesses,
make videos, and reply to emails for you?
You always feel a step behind,
forever playing catch-up,
always feeling a sense of breathless anxiety.
It's not that you aren't working hard enough.
This is the inevitable dizziness
of someone sitting inside an accelerating spaceship.
The three-day fate of Claude 3.5 Sonnet
is that very curve,
the moment it suddenly spiked in front of our eyes.
So,
what's pushing this curve to become steeper and steeper?
That is the true protagonist of today.
Dario gave a chilling answer: Artificial Intelligence
is already starting to improve Artificial Intelligence.
Notice,
he's not using the future tense;
he's using the present continuous.
He said,
a year ago,
the efficiency boost AI brought to their company
was about ten to fifteen percent.
Now?
Twenty to thirty percent.
And "
it's probably doubling."
More importantly, he said current AI
is already capable of proposing new architectural designs
for the next generation of AI.
Do you understand the weight of that statement?
In the past,
humans made tools.
A blacksmith makes a hammer;
the hammer doesn't turn around and improve the blacksmith.
But now,
Claude is helping Anthropic
design the next, smarter Claude.
The thing that was created
is starting to turn back
and participate in the process that created it.
This is why this company can release products
at an almost frantic pace.
Because those building the products
are no longer just humans.
Dario himself admits
that the key reason they can move so fast today
is that they are already using Claude
to help train and refine
the next generation of Claude.
Slow this image down in your mind: one intelligence
is manually crafting an intelligence smarter than itself.
And that smarter one
will then turn back once more.
to polish the next one.
Chain by chain,
each link spins faster than the last.
Once this process starts moving,
it won't stop.
Once this loop closes,
it no longer needs to wait for some "singularity moment."
It itself
is an accelerating perpetual motion machine.
This
is the real engine making that exponential curve steeper.
Now,
we can return to Fable 5,
and its hidden elder brother,
Mythos.
Before Fable 5,
Anthropic was holding back a model
codenamed Mythos.
How terrifying was it?
They had it scan code,
and from a world-renowned "secure" OS,
it found a 27-year-old bug that no one had ever discovered.
They pointed it at Firefox,
and it found 271 brand-new vulnerabilities in one go,
all of which the strongest past models couldn't find.
What's more fatal,
it doesn't just "find" vulnerabilities,
it transforms them directly into weaponized exploits.
Anthropic gave it to several partners for testing.
They were terrified.
They pleaded back: "This is a superweapon."
Using it should be like using a gun—
you should need a license first.
"Please, do not release it."
So Anthropic didn't release it publicly.
They only gave it,
in limited quantities, to a few defensive security teams,
letting them beat the bad guys to it
and patch the holes in the world's software,
one by one.
Dario's logic is this: vulnerabilities are finite.
Arm the good guys first,
let them plug all the holes.
By the time the bad guys get the same weapon,
they'll find no walls left to attack.
This is a company
that proactively locks its strongest weapon
in a safe.
But don't forget,
Mythos had another identity.
Dario said
this was the very model
that vastly accelerated Anthropic's own internal research.
You see,
it was the core gear of that perpetual motion machine.
A model too powerful to be public
turns back around
to build an even stronger next generation.
Recursion.
It's happening right here.
And Fable 5
is that Mythos-level power
wearing a "safety coat" for the first time,
stepping out to the general public.
It added a layer of guardrails for itself.
For high-risk topics like cyberattacks or bio-chem,
it defaults to a simpler, older model for the answer.
But the result?
Three days after launch,
the US government stepped in.
The government worried
that these guardrails could be "jailbroken"—
bypassed using certain prompts—
to unlock the Mythos-level cyberattack capabilities
inside.
So the government issued an export control order: any foreign national,
regardless of whether they are in the US,
is forbidden from using it.
And Anthropic said,
"I cannot distinguish nationality in real-time, every second."
What could be done?
They had to implement a blanket ban.
Access for everyone worldwide,
including us,
was completely shut down.
Think about how absurd this is.
A company that emphasizes safety and restraint above all,
which willingly locked up its most powerful weapon,
was ultimately forced by its own government
to pull the plug.
In that interview, Dario Amodei
said something
that sounds like a prophecy now.
He said, "Regarding this technology,
I fear a company owning it,
but I also fear a government owning it."
Before he could even catch his breath,
the government's hand
had already reached in.
This is how that smooth exponential curve
bares its fangs.
It doesn't announce the "singularity" with drums and trumpets.
It simply lets an uncontrollably powerful capability
go online,
and then vanish.
It all happened within three days.
It was so fast you couldn't even react
before it had already rewritten the rules.
So, what should we do?
Should we join the group shouting "AI is waking up,
stop everything now" and panic?
Or join the others saying "it's just capital hype,
AI is still far off" and laugh it off?
Dario says
both reactions
are immature.
Crying "nothing to fear" today,
then "we're doomed" tomorrow—
this constant flip-flopping
only proves that a person is terrified.
It proves they aren't serious.
A truly mature attitude,
he says,
is like a surgeon performing an operation,
or an officer facing a battlefield.
You can't pretend the risk doesn't exist,
but you absolutely cannot panic.
What you must do
is ensure your response
levels up gear by gear,
smoothly matching the technology's capability.
He calls this the "Rosetta Stone" for understanding it all.
That smooth exponential curve—
once you understand it,
you will neither be blindly optimistic
nor succumb to pointless panic.
You might say,
"Whether models are shut down
is between tech giants and the government.
What does it have to do with me?"
It has everything to do with you.
What this really tells you is: the ground beneath your feet
is moving at a speed you cannot see.
If a capability
can appear within three days
and then disappear,
it means
the rules you count on for your livelihood,
and the skills you thought would last a decade,
could be quietly rewritten
on a morning when you're completely off guard.
Understanding that smooth curve
isn't meant to make you anxious.
On the contrary,
it's so you can adjust your stance
before the curve goes vertical.
Speaking of which,
if we only stay at the level of tech and politics,
then today's talk would be for nothing.
I want to dig one layer deeper.
Exploring what this channel truly cares about.
"AI improving AI."
The underlying structure of this
is a shape that is terrifyingly ancient.
It's called "self-reference."
Among those who study consciousness,
there is Douglas Hofstadter,
author of the masterpiece "Gödel, Escher, Bach."
He spent his life explaining one thing: consciousness.
How does it emerge from unconscious neurons?
His answer is one term: the "Strange Loop."
A system
complex enough to a certain degree
begins to point back at itself.
It observes, discusses, and modifies itself as an object.
Once this loop is formed,
the "I" is born.
On this channel,
we've discussed this before: that "I" sitting in your head,
thinking it's making decisions,
is actually just the brain system
pointing at itself and weaving a story.
Simply put,
the "self" we are all so proud of
is itself a strange loop—a system
complex enough to point at itself and say, "This is me."
Now look back at "AI improving AI."
A man-made system
turns back
to improve the process that created it.
Is this not a strange loop?
Is this not "self-reference"
opening its eyes for the first time
in a silicon-based world?
And this structure
was written about by Laozi 2,500 years ago.
The Tao gives birth to One,
One gives birth to Two,
Two gives birth to Three,
Three gives birth to ten thousand things.
Notice the word "birth"—not "make."
It's "birth."
To "make"
implies an external craftsman.
To "give birth"
is to grow from within.
Layer by layer,
it gives birth to itself.
In Taoist philosophy,
the world was never molded
by an external deity.
It began from a single point,
spiraling, splitting, and growing on its own.
A self-unfolding system requiring no outside builder.
That word "birth" from 2,500 years ago
and today's "AI improving AI" loop
are actually describing the same thing.
We’ve mentioned this before: the universe
is using your eyes
to see itself for the first time.
Today, let me say something even bolder.
If human consciousness
is the universe "seeing" itself for the first time,
then AI improving AI
might be the universe's first step
in "rewriting" itself.
It first recognized itself
through our carbon-based brains.
Now,
using the silicon-based brains we built,
it begins to iterate upon itself.
The same strange loop of self-reference,
just in a different material,
spinning even faster.
So you see,
the three-day drama of Fable 5
is not just tech news.
It is that most ancient cycle
finally reaching our turn,
and kicking up a tiny spray of water.
I'll leave you with a question,
but won't answer it today.
When the line between the improver and the improved
begins to blur,
when Claude is writing Claude,
and when each of us
is using AI to improve ourselves,
that boundary of "who is improving whom"—
can we still tell the difference?
Are we passengers in that accelerating starship,
or could it be
that we ourselves
are the accelerating ship?
I don't have the answer,
but I'd love to hear yours.
In the last couple of days,
have you used Fable 5?
The moment it was halted,
what was the first thought that flashed through your mind?
Was it regret?
Was it fear?
Or an indescribable vertigo from looking down a cliff?
Let me know in the comments.
I'll read every single one.
I'm Wang Lijie.
See you next time.