angle-bracket components not working

ember-cli@1.3.8 
ember@2.1.0

I manually updated ember to 1.2.0 inside package.json.

When I do the following

<my-component model={{model}} /> 

I get the following rendered in HTML.

<my-component model="<dummy@model:employee::ember395:null>"></my-component>

And the component is not rendered at all. I put a breakpoint in the init method but it is never called. I seems to me the the component is not recognised for some reason.

Is there something I need to enable in ember-cli or ember for this to work? Am I doing anything wrong?