When I say “how” I mean like how u/glouwbug mentioned: Formatting. But more so Structure.
When I read artifacts by Frontier Labs I notice a trend towards deteriorating lexicographic architecture. Like how a textbook or larger tomb is constructed for the reader to navigate.
Instead, now I see continuous monotonic text. It’s as if the author expects us to chuck the artifact into an LLM in order for it to inform us of meaning.
I feel like this is a common format for social sciences or economics papers, e.g. most of the papers I've seen on ssrn.com have a similar structure.
To be sure, I always did find those a bit hard to read (they seem to never have evolved past the stage where papers were read on, y'know, paper instead of screens) but I think this paper is simply keeping with the conventions for studies on this subject matter.
Single column PDF. This is the frontier.
I find single column much easier to read than dual. Though the line spacing is too much in this concrete example.
It’s an econ paper. What do you want? A page of Claude slop with the small caps subtitles?
Is it an "econ paper?" I'm sorry for the continued contrarian route here but I ask it in earnest. Are we compromising our standards of economic papers to fit the fad?
Like how I gestured in my top-level comment, are we being an economic analysis or seeming an economic analysis. I regard the efforts of Frontier Labs with suspicion because a lot of their marketing efforts around "Artificial Intelligence" appear (to me) as acquisitive and power hungry to a fault: they are all consuming in that every author on this paper has a superscript 1 to denote association with OpenAI.
Yes with an extra helping of emdashes!