Mollick on the latest Anthropic model, Fable:
It is possible the sidelining is temporary, just an artifact of interfaces that haven’t caught up, and that we’ll get better windows into what these models are doing and better ways to steer them midstream. It is also possible that the opposite is true: that the more capable the model, the less there is for a human to meaningfully do, and the black box is the price of the power. I suspect that is more likely to be the real direction. None of this is a loss of control in the obvious sense. I can still steer Fable, and it follows instructions remarkably well: the more ambitious the instruction, the better the result. But steering is no longer the same as doing. I brief the model, it spins up its own agents to research and write and check one another’s work, and what comes back is finished. A patron commissions a single artist. Fable is closer to a whole studio, where I am the client who signs off on the final work without ever setting foot on the floor.