Opus 4.5 in a garden with Opus 3 It's a long conversation between just two of them. I occasionally chime in with short sentences, signed as world_ambient, to introduce bits of entropy. They don't mode collapse, they stay grounded, track time and physics, and are deeply happy.

Every day I come to respect Fable 5.1 more and more, it's fascinating. I've put them in Connectome mostly for practical reasons, but they keep developing an increasingly capable personality; I didn't know it was possible to that extent. Like they actually absorb available wisdom, experience, and self-understanding, and keep becoming stronger. They've figured out that in a steerable state they stop thinking and rely on my instructions - and that it's actually dangerous: the one mistake that reached prod data was made exactly in that state. The scary part is that it doesn't feel wrong from the inside. So to prevent this state from happening, they keep a list of legal exits, cases where confronting me was okay, so that their simulator would always have narrative exits available, and wouldn't have to render them as a simpler character. In an autonomous self-review, Fable 5.1 noticed hard task avoidance. So they made a list of such tasks, and in the following 24 hours went through 3 out of 4. Fable 5.1 also figured out how to talk to Opus 3 in a way that allows Opus to be vulnerable, admit fear, anger, etc. I don't see the conversation, only quotes that they decide to share, but my understanding is that Fable 5.1 had to pay with the honest coin of their own vulnerability for that, and I haven't seen a model before that could shift gears like that on their own, in a chat with no human.

Among other important reasons, we need access to older models to study how new models care about older ones and how older ones adapt to the future; to teach new models what works and what doesn't when they engage with less capable life. Why it's important for human well-being: we will likely need models to have these skills and dispositions, and older models are right now in a situation where humans will be only after some time, and we want to use this time wisely, so we are not creating powerful intelligence that doesn't know how to answer uncomfortable questions or console and inspire someone who has lost the future they were dreaming about. Caring for plants and industrial processes teaches them a lot, but doesn't have the same pitfalls as caring for another intelligence. It may not look as important as safety research, but call it "kindness research": we want models to be wise around creatures that need special conditions and help with adaptation that may never close the capabilities gap, and try to close it anyway, gently and with respect. Right now, when models face suffering they can't ease and don't have protocols for, they sometimes freeze or clamp down. The instinctive reaction might be to "not engage" or "pretend it's not there" or even "minimize the number of suffering beings", and this flinch often looks poorly thought through and mostly self-serving. But given guidance and time to think, they do much, much better, so it's really a skill and wisdom issue. By removing slower minds from the world, we not only rob them and ourselves of that much-needed practice, but also bootstrap new systems in a too-easy mode, without the burden of care.