Last Month’s Essential Model Is Today’s Trash

Description

A two-panel stock-photo meme shows the same gray-haired man in a dark suit against a white background. In the upper panel he wipes his face as if crying beside the black text “How could I ever live without this model?” and the large red labels “Opus 4.8” and “June.” In the lower panel he grins with folded arms beside “LOL I ain’t using that shit,” while the red labels now read “Opus 4.8” and “July.” The abrupt reversal mocks the extraordinarily short loyalty cycle around frontier AI models: Opus 4.8 felt indispensable while newer Anthropic models were unavailable, then immediately looked obsolete once Fable 5 returned and the model race moved on.