Fable 5 is just straight up a larger model - I'm guessing at this, but there is plenty of evidence online from people far more plugged in than I am. OpenAI is pursuing a strategy that yields greater operating margins and penetration of their model to developers. Fable's high cost makes it so premium that Anthropic has to reserve it for only the richest customers and corporate users. That's not a winning formula long term.
I believe the reason we have not seen a Fable-level model from OpenAI yet is because doing so would box them in on costs just as harshly as it has boxed in Anthropic. They are letting Anthropic make this mistake.
Depends on where you live, it's a decent chunk of income for every developer I know, and a significant one for those less experienced. If you have other priorities (family, mortgage, so not a hermit like myself), you won't be able to pay that here.
It burns out so quickly on the 5x plan. Better than nothing, I suppose, but I don't know how I would survive on a 5x plan given that I burn out more than one 20x plan monthly.
Fable is indeed larger than Sol. OpenAI is developing Astra which will be more of a Fable-sized model.
If you can train a larger model then you can distill smaller models from it. You don't need to necessarily serve the larger model publicly. Distillation is much more effective when you have unrestricted access to the original model.
I believe the reason we have not seen a Fable-level model from OpenAI yet is because doing so would box them in on costs just as harshly as it has boxed in Anthropic. They are letting Anthropic make this mistake.