This is the first frontier model release by them that I am not that moved or eager to go use it, will likely stay on Opus 5.5 or other frontier models.
I am curious as to why they launched this one and why now.
Fable usage falling off a cliff because it was generally worse than Opus 5.5 at a lot of SWE tasks. People were still using fable 5.1 > opus 5 a lot, especially in orgs that have infinite or basically-infinite usage limits (e.g. Cloudflare[0]), until Opus 5.5 came out. Medium Opus is pretty token efficient with XHigh being really good for things fable used to be ideal for (e.g. reasoning / architecting projects). 5.2 sounds like it'll be once again the best for intuition-dependent tasks.
0: https://x.com/tanayj/status/2118047122939658341
Cloudflare doesn't have token leaderboards or limits, but uses alerts for token spend management:
- $300 in a day: that employee gets an email
- $500: manager gets an email
- $1,000: VP gets an email
(via CTO @dok2001 on No Priors)
I was eager to use it, but have seen no noticeable improvement over Opus 5.5, plus it's slower and drains usage approximately three times faster.
As a preliminary verdict after using 25% of the weekly limit: it's a miss.
I'm not sure "we couldn't top Opus 5.5" is the right message for the upcoming IPO. I was expecting a significant release.