“Free Fable ‘til the End of This Week” Turn This Confusion Into Your Next Great Customer Service
First there was Claude. Then there was Mythos. Then Fable. Then no Fable. Then Fable is back. Then Fable is free short-term. At the end of this week, that changes again…
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The ground moved beneath our feet three times this year, and the year is barely half-way-through!
Compute
Let’s start with compute. In April, the going hourly rate for Nvidia Blackwell capacity jumped 48% in about ten weeks from $2.75 to $4.08, per the Ornn Compute Price Index reporting picked up by tech press. That wasn’t a blip. No surprise AWS and Azure responded by moving Blackwell access into priority tiers, putting existing enterprise-agreement customers and the big frontier labs ahead of everyone else in line.
If your client was an SMB or mid-market shop self-serving on one of those hyperscalers, they’re now behind that line, whether they know it or not. And they had no way of anticipating that any of it was going to happen until it did, very expensively.
Export Policy
With government decisions being driven by how much money could be extracted from the situation, export policy moved just as fast, but in opposite directions, and it happened twice.
In January, the Bureau of Industry and Security eased its posture on H200-class chip exports to China, shifting from a presumption of denial to case-by-case review. By June, Commerce had reversed course on a related loophole, affirming that its licensing rules apply to any Chinese-headquartered company anywhere in the world, not just inside China. Two rulings, five months apart, both fully legal, both changing what a client’s supply chain or data-processing arrangement was allowed to touch.
Imagine the government doing anything at the scale of AI growth… on a case-by-case basis. Can you say “Dead Stop?” I knew ya could.
Large Language Models (LLM)
Even the model vendors aren’t immune, including the one I always use for research. In June, Anthropic suspended access to two newly released frontier models, Fable and Mythos, to comply with a Commerce Department export control. Commerce lifted the control at the end of the month, and Anthropic restored access on July 1. Three weeks, start to finish, for models that had existed for three days before the suspension hit. And, according to a story featured in this issue, the conditional availability of those models changes at the end of this week. Unless it extends yet again. Which it could. But may not.
