What the Fable fiasco means for you

It’s time to check out the new Siri

Author

Dino Gane-Palmer
June 23, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Hi, and happy Tuesday.

You’re probably up-to-speed with the Fable jokes, but here’s a quick recap:

  • SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are IPO’ing this year with astronomical multi-trillion dollar valuations justified by the assumption that everyone on Earth will be a customer. “AI is the new electricity, and everyone is going to need it”.

  • On Friday 12th June, 5:21pm - the US government surprised Anthropic with a letter that shut down their latest model - Fable. Silicon Valley had done such a good job of convincing everyone they’re building digital nukes, the government actually believed them.

  • The talk now is that access to these models needs to be limited. When your target market shrinks from the entire global economy to people who have passed a background check, the trillion dollar valuations start to look like a hallucination.

  • On Saturday 13th June, 5:21pm - Z.AI launched GLM 5.2. Remember Deepseek? Z.AI - is another Chinese lab intent on killing frontier models. GLM 5.2 is an open source model that some compare in performance to Opus 4.8 / GPT 5.5. With a $7000 Mac Studio setup, you can run it yourself, at home.

All of this points to a problem. To put it simply:

The AI industry appears to be spending $650+ billion/year on a data center buildout for what - within a few months - is available for $7000,  and the buildout is for a roadmap of future products that may be illegal.

What does this mean for you?

On a macro level…

Harvard economist Jason Furman last year suggested that, without the AI buildout spend, US economic growth may be closer to flat – that it accounted for 90% GDP growth last year.

If you’re not in the AI industry, you may have already been feeling the pinch. Without it, we might feel it more.

On a tactical level…

You don’t even need to spend $7000 to see where this is headed.

If you own a 15 Pro or more recent iPhone, you can upgrade to the new Siri.

Siri AI is the type of on-device AI that the open source models from Chinese labs threaten, but neatly packaged for the mainstream.  What it lacks in frontier capability, it makes up for by knowing a lot about you.

There are plenty of reviews elsewhere, but the headline is that Siri finally works.  Siri can now:

  • Act as a localized search engine for your life, sifting through your messages and emails. .

  • Perform actions across multiple apps in single spoken command, e.g. copy an Instagram caption, throw it into Apple Notes, auto-generate a summary with follow-up research questions, and email the final product back to yourself.

  • Parse heavy files and perform analysis, e.g. In Finder you can highlight a bank statement PDF and command Siri to categorize expenses and draft a summary – all without opening the PDF. 

Right now, all this works only if you’re living in Apple's native suite (Mail, Messages, Calendar, Notes). For those of us trapped in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, it will feel like a beautiful house you can't move into until Apple rolls out third-party App Intents integrations.

If you’re on a more recent iPhone and want to try it out, go into your phone’s settings and request the iOS 27 beta upgrade to be added to the Siri AI waitlist;  wait times are currently at ~5 days.

If you’re in the Android ecosystem, many of the Siri features are available on the Pixel 10 if you live entirely within the Google ecosystem (Gmail, Google Workspace, Google Messages). 

In case you missed them, some of my previous posts dive deeper on these topics:

How Apple has been betting on on-device AI for almost a decade:

Our review of Fable 5:

But Siri is just one form-factor for AI. 

Just like we have screens on our phones, in our cars and on our desks - AI will continue to show on in  many ways.

We're building an AI "employee."

Best,

Dino