In some ways the new Fable is a monster. This is SimpleQA Verified from Epoch. There are few benchmarks like this where Fable 5.2 jaggedly jumped ahead of the entire pack.

For me there are two big indicators arriving next week that will tell us a lot about the shape of things going into 2027. I'm assuming two things happen next week: Anthropic releases their internal progress report (from which we will get updated numbers on RSI), and OpenAI releases GPT-6.2 Astra.

With the new Astra, we will see how OpenAI answers Fable, and Fable needs to be answered. They need to close the gap, but they also need to close the gap that doesn’t show up on benchmarks: that a lot of people love working with the new Anthropic models, particularly Opus 5.5. And this is starting to tip the table a little. Also expect another huge math release simultaneously with the new Astra. The previous one took five weeks and produced 700 papers; they've had another five weeks since then. They have also been working on other Millennium problems. Don't be shocked by anything.

Astra's capability, and if it catches or surpasses Fable, is the first one. The second is where Anthropic is on AL4. The AI Futures Project (the AI 2027 guys) predict that AL4 reached 50% last month. If that's true, that means it will probably hit 80% by January. And at that point, assuming the overall pattern holds, some of the work at Anthropic will be at AL5 - aka fully autonomous with no human input. Probably about 5–10% of work at Anthropic would be at that level. If this number is actually higher than 50%, then things are moving even faster than believed, and that would be a big update for a lot of people, including me, who already has pretty short timelines. Above AL4 50% in October would probably mean RSI before the end of the year. Or possibly, already. So, a very important week for finding out where we are, and where we are headed.