August 2026

“The thing about Fable that is weird is that it's the first model I've ever felt like I shouldn't waste its time.” — Noah Brier, Slate Money

The Slate Money panel was debating whether it matters which AI model you use. Brier, arguing you should stay near the frontier, lands on an oddly human reaction to one of them — that for the first time he felt he shouldn't waste a model's time, a sentiment the hosts immediately teased him about.

Transcript

Slate Money Around 26:10 into the episode
Noah Brier

You should care to an extent in that you should be using something near the frontier.

Felix Salmon

And why?

Noah Brier

They're just better and smarter. You're going to find them more effective. You're going to be annoyed less at them just doing really dumb things. But the other side of that is it really depends what you're doing. So while I think Fable overall is the best model, it's really good at certain things and not so good at other things. And one of the things I find myself doing with Fable a lot is I'll do planning with Fable, but then I'll actually do execution, code execution, like have it write other models write code, because I find that Fable, it's kind of a waste of time and money to have Fable do it. And sometimes it gets sort of over-manufactured. Fable also, going back to the writing question, is famously at this point verbose and obtuse in the way that it talks. And it's very hard. I constantly am like, can you give me this jargon-free, please? And it just is terrible at not giving you paragraphs and paragraphs of stuff and telling you lots of words. The thing about Fable that is weird is that it's the first model I've ever felt like I shouldn't waste its time. Oh

Emily Peck

dear. Do you find yourself talking to it that way? Like it's apologizing. Sorry to say that. How much money do

Felix Salmon

you spend on Fable? You're worried about like using it for things that it's like beneath it.

Noah Brier

A lot. Many, I don't know. I mean, our AI budget is in the tens of many tens of thousands of dollars a month. Not just me.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode