Claude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelican
Source
simonwillison.net
Date
Terms in this piece · Glossary
LLM — A large language model — the neural network behind tools like Claude and ChatGPT, trained on huge amounts of text to predict what comes next.
benchmark — A standard public test set for comparing AI models — the shared scoreboards behind every "model X beats model Y" claim.
Why it matters
Within-family comparisons at different reasoning efforts are the useful signal now, and Fable 5.1's low and medium settings appear to record no reasoning traces, which matters when choosing an effort level against cost.