Fable 5 just changed everything

On Tuesday, Anthropic released its new model: Fable 5.

I rarely cover the news here. There's too much of it for that to be useful.

But this time, for the first time since I started working with artificial intelligence, I felt something new. Exciting and, I have to admit, slightly terrifying. And if you have more than 5 to 10 years of experience in your field (whatever the field), what follows concerns you in particular.

I'm an engineer by training, and I code every day. Every model until now was impressive, but you always needed:

a good engineer on top: one for the architecture,
and at least one more for the thousand small details in the code that separate software that runs from software that breaks.

Well, that was true until Tuesday... here's what's CRAZY:

Over the past few weeks, we'd been looking to hire a software engineer at my startup, DentAI. Interviews had started.

Then Fable 5 came out, I spent three days with it, and for the first time, I feel like a model can handle that second role, to the point that we put the hiring on hold!

What remains is the first role: someone experienced who knows, at every step, whether what comes out is right. Without that person, you get code that looks perfect and breaks. With them, you get the work of a whole team.

This goes far beyond code

The value of anyone with experience in their field, if they grasp what's happening right now, can EXPLODE!

Take an estate lawyer with twenty years in practice. Their experience isn't just their degree. It's everything they've accumulated that nobody can learn from a book:

which clause to check first in a complicated estate,
which case is going to be trouble just from looking at who the heirs are,
which mistake in a deed costs years of litigation.
how to handle an anxious client...

Hundreds of subtleties like that, paid for in years of practice (and payable only in years of practice).

Except this knowledge has always had a limit:

To put it to work at a larger scale, you needed people. Staff to prepare deeds, check documents, draft, follow up, organize. Their experience was precious, but stuck behind an entire team.

And that limit just vanished, and it's almost unsettling...

Tools like Fable can now handle that whole part: preparing, drafting, checking, organizing. But careful: there's one thing they CANNOT do, and that's where it all plays out: knowing whether it's right.

But there's one subtlety that changes absolutely everything today:

The person who can really do it all isn't the tool on its own, nor a junior who knows the tool but not the trade. It's the experienced lawyer who knows how to use these AI tools.

They can handle, almost single-handedly, what used to take a whole firm. Now replace "lawyer" with your own profession: the mechanics are exactly the same.

And let me be clear on one point, because a lot of people believe the opposite:

in this equation, you're the one starting with the advantage. You can learn these tools in a few months. A junior who already knows them will need years, maybe decades, to replicate your experience.

❝

Today, it's experienced people who have the highest potential.

But you still have to make the move: learn, get comfortable, really commit.

Take two people with the same profession and the same years of experience, where only one has made that move into AI: the gap between them can become huge.

It cuts both ways: an incredible opportunity if it's you. A gap quietly widening if it's the other one.

Just one more thing for the road, and it's wild:

Anthropic actually has a model even more powerful than Fable, called Mythos, which they only give to a handful of hand-picked organizations, because they believe it could cause real problems in the world 🫠

Maybe I'm getting carried away, and in hindsight this week will just be another week. But there's a real chance we've just crossed a threshold!

In fact, that's exactly the subject of Sunday's Ergon Report: "Knowing what's right."

Whether you end up with a massive edge in the years ahead, or fall dangerously behind the people who made the move, this is what it comes down to. It may be the most important thing we've ever written.

The Ergon Report is the private publication for French-speaking executives and experienced professionals, where I go deep on these subjects:

every week, a twenty-page report on what AI changes for your profession and your company, with a ready-to-use tool to apply it in your own work.

If you want to receive Sunday's issue, it's right here:

Sunday's report

See you Sunday,

Salim