Y Combinator's Garry Tan warns a hypothetical Fable 5 ban could cost $12 million hourly in lost developer productivity

@garrytan @kimmaicutler it’s unclear they had compute to handle this capacity though? maybe with colossus.

@garrytan what % of brain cells out of the day do you think you burn posting on x?

@garrytan

@garrytan Not only is there a real opportunity cost to Fable being offline, but there's also now a experiential cost. People loved Fable and everything else just feels lackluster. It's like a drug. People got a taste of the best stuff and want more.

@garrytan you can't just use *average hourly developer cost* as *marginal vibecoding productivity*

(I mean you can, but it's not justified imo)

@garrytan Source @WorkWeave

That's actually not that bad on a national scale. We spend way more than that on lots of things.

If this is *actually* about national security or even x-risk, then it's a fine price to pay.

Of course if it's a political attack (which it seems to be) then that cost is clearly not worth it.

@garrytan I think these numbers are way off, Fable is WAY more than 15% more productive

@garrytan Its better to compare this figure with the API costs that those 5M devs will incur if all of them were to work with Fable 5. Better to lose a fixed intangible than incur an actual variable cost that depends on the token consumption of those 5M devs.

@garrytan 5 million devs times a rounding error is not a rounding error

@garrytan the fable 5 export control set a precedent every AI lab is now pricing into future releases. one jailbreak report from a competitor's researcher can pull your best model mid-launch. open source catching up the same week made the control mechanism look even more fragile

@garrytan Garry throwing darts

@garrytan $12m/hr assumes that productivity was free to make.

anthropic eats way more than that in tokens. so part of the 15% was subsidy not output.

the ban stops the gain AND the bleed. net loss is lower and anthropics margins go up while fable's dark

hey @grok give me a exact prompt starting with /create-website that i can give my agent so it can make a live website stopwatch starting from when fable got turned off and keep along with it a total count of how much theoretically they have lost in not being able to run fable called "FableisDrainingAnt". (the /create-website command uses the stack i want, dont worry about this just prefix the prompt with it)

i need a sharable modal that people can copy and post to x and others that show the amount and time since

give me a brand and theme though to go with

this plan needs to encompass the ideology to get from freshsession to a website created (minus the language or stack of the website)

@AkhilKolla @garrytan What is a unit of productivity in this calculation? What is being measured?

@garrytan Peace of mind knowing that stewardship of the country will not be handed to Polycule Counterspell Warlocks: Priceless.

@CongealedMayo @garrytan Are you not using AI to QA the Dev work?

@AkhilKolla @garrytan We automate with AI and fill in holes in test plan generation but we spend a lot of time reviewing and deleting garbage and correcting for blind spots. We have Claude integrated with Jira, Slack, GitHub etc. Literally the only people “thinking” they have productivity gains is dev

@garrytan I think these are all conservative numbers, I am guessing more than 5 Million devs were using it!

@CongealedMayo @garrytan $2.40/dev/hr