> Claude Opus 5.5 is our first release since we called for pacing the frontier.
Interesting how the very first line is used to remind the reader of their call to pace the frontier just last week, and everything else after that line is to demonstrate with very specific numbers how they absolutely are not pacing.
“Pacing the frontier” sounds smarmy and weird, like the phrase was generated by Claude itself
I really don't think it's productive for internet forums to constantly be criticizing language choice when the meaning is clear. Better to respond to the substance of the issue than word choice.
Edit: In response to the initial replies. To me it clearly means "releasing frontier models at any pace less than as fast as possible". It implies relative restraint compared to the previous state and without stating the degree of restraint.
The meaning isn't clear at all. So open for interpretation that it is meaningless. That's the whole fucking point. For all I know they are "pacing the frontier", or not. The fact that there's no meaning to it let's you know that it was a pointless waste of tokens and attention.
There's a whole blog article written by Dario Amodei, literally linked from the text "pacing the frontier" - click that and read if you need more context and understanding. The first sentence in this press release is merely stating a fact about the timeline - this is Anthropic's first release since Amodei released the referenced article.
Yes and it was nonsense. Amodei is free to slow up frontier development and focus more on safety and testing any day.
The reason why he and is peers are calling for it to be implemented by somebody else (a legal framework), is for their own financial benefit and to keep competitors out.
What do you think would be the benefit of them stopping if others race ahead? Do you think they have some special ability no one else will find, among the many competitive firms right now?
I believe they think slowing can only be coordinated from the frontier or via government, and stopping would lose any leverage they have to help coordinate that.
(I suspect not many people read the essay, judging by how many people seem surprised they're releasing improved models)
That's not the point. They're never going to be the ones stopping and letting others race ahead. The only reason to strum up discussion around how dangerous AI is, is so that they can introduce legislation framing AI advancements as scary and that they are the only ones who can do it responsibly. It's all a regulatory capture play.
> What do you think would be the benefit of them stopping if others race ahead?
AI is a direct threat to people on many fronts. Jobs. AI datacenters. The AI bubble (and the inevitable crash). Electricity and even energy prices to an extent. Water. OpenAI and Anthropic are responsible for this evolution, and them stopping solves close to 50% of the problem, and even if you don't believe the number is that high, it's still a start.
> I believe they think slowing can only be coordinated from the frontier or via government, and stopping would lose any leverage they have to help coordinate that.
Oh, so they're killing people's opportunities and jobs because they want to help people? How is that any argument?
Yes, doing the moral thing means making a sacrifice. If you only want to do the moral thing if and only if it is advantage for you that makes you immoral, despite how your actions look. Big tech are masters at this.
I think it's perfectly clear. It means improvements shouldn't simply advance as fast as possible and more specifically, it's a reference to a past statement of theirs to that effect. At that level of generality it's as clear as it needs to be.
I would say the burden is on you to explain why an offhand reference to a previous press release in an executive summary is a context where it's reasonable to expect it to settle the question to the degree of detail you're demanding.
That’s no more than sophisticated avoidance. The phrase remains superficial and arbitrary, which is exactly what it needs to Not be in a public discussion that it’s supposed to support. It’s a reinforcement of the blank check mentality that permeates this industry.
“Pacing the frontier” is similar to the role of a “pace car” in racing.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_car
> In motorsport, a safety car, or a pace car, is a car that limits the speed of competing cars or motorcycles on a racetrack in the case of a caution period, such as an obstruction on the track or bad weather.
Yes, but I think part of the problem is that it's a very US term, used in nascar and indycar. The rest of the sports/world use safety car.
Is the meaning clear? Nobody would use "pacing" in this way. I only know what it means because I've seen previous press releases; if someone told me they wanted to pace the frontier I would have no idea what they mean.
I'm on the fence about calling out AI-isms but I think it's definitely worthwhile to call out ones that actually don't make sense.
It makes sense to me. If you 'pace your running', you're setting the speed intentionally. The phrasing doesn't describe whether it is fast pace or a slow pace, but it describes having a goal and not just winging it.
That's one interpretation. When referring not to other actions but to a word describing a location it becomes more ambiguous.
eg "pacing the frontier" could also mean they are impatiently or anxiously walking up and down the border.
This is a more normal English meaning in my opinion — you picture a sentry patrolling a border.
That’s what I thought the original blog post was going to be about, pacing back and forth along the frontier. It’s a much more straightforward parse.
That's when one is supposed to employ their common sense for semantic disambiguation. Spoken languages are not programming languages. I for one found it easy to parse.
People claiming they don't understand or are confused by relatively simple English is a surprisingly common genre of comments on HN. I wonder what causes the people here to have these feelings towards English; my guess is indeed that many people here judge English as if it were a programming language.
That is certainly one possible explanation, but I think another likely explanation is that once your brain learn programming, especially logic, data structures & algorithms, you just start seeing the ambiguity in non-programmers' writing so much more clearly.
This is because it is valley jargon and we are all saturated with it. You may not have heard it before, but it is structurally close to similar concepts, eg "frontier model", that you got there without noticing.
It was still shit tier comms for communicating with the whole planet, but yes, for the inner loop, it was succinct and clear.
Valley neuralese
'Pacing' in the intended meaning is not valley jargon, it's almost the opposite in that it comes from athletics/sports.
Valley jargon isn't a nerd vs jock thing these days, and hasn't been for a good while. It's more quasi-intellectual sophistry sprinkled with tech vocabulary.
That analogy doesn't hold up. In running you have to pace yourself to avoid falling apart later in the race. It's a strategy to maximize net speed across the entire race. But what Anthropic is doing is a cynical attempt to create an industry cartel or convince governments to impose legal restrictions in order to maximize their own profitability. They're afraid of running out of the capital necessary to stay in the race.
> They're afraid of running out of the capital necessary to stay in the race.
So, they're pacing themselves. And since they're the frontier roughly 33%+ of the time, they're "pacing the frontier" at least that much.
Less cynical and more true interpretation also holds: they are trying to slow down AI progres to give people better chance to keep up (see Hugging Face incident, and whatever was that Anthropic incident the other day). They'd ideally like the AI progress to stop soon, but of course they'd also like to come out ahead of everyone, so for various (more or less self-serving) reasons they don't want to close shop completely - hence, pacing.
I don't know what everyone is getting so mad about. This is a well defined concept. A pace car deliberately sets the pace of the race under dangerous conditions, regulating how fast people can go.
You are all getting mad about absolutely the dumbest thing when there are giant things to be worried about here.
I think it's less mad - and more pointing out the obvious elephant in the room.
1. It's just bad communication, full stop - just look at the comments here, even people allegedly in support of Anthropic are all arguing over what the phrase is even meant to mean.
2. It's flowery language and oddly out of place - which yes, can be triggering for people who have to deal with Claude doing this as well.
Claude seems overly apt to reach for "coinages", or neologism (yes, aha, I learnt that phrase, after spending time dealing with Claude...). It will create some made-up phrase to describe an otherwise dry, scientific CS concept, and nobody seems to know why. Surely it can't be user-focus groups?
So it would be peak-AI if somehow, the Anthropic communications team was also using Claude to author these blog posts, about how they were "pacing the frontier" - which either means they're betting big on AI, and going at it faster than OpenAI...or maybe it means they need to slow down releases, because it's too buggy...or maybe it means they're worried about regulatory capture? I honestly have no idea.
It's like the whole "Advancing Our Amazing Bet" corporate-speak from my old bosses - maybe they were trying to soften the blow or something, or be nice, but it ended up just confusing the heck out of everybody.. (Spoiler alert - the phrase actually meant they were shutting the whole thing down)
You appear to be confused about the concept. Depending on the context, pacing or pace setting can mean either slowing things down or speeding them up relative to what the natural pace would have otherwise been. So it's actually not well defined. The commenters here aren't necessarily mad, just calling out Anthropic for being unethical in trying to artificially slow down competition by lying about fake dangers. (And I actually really like Anthropic's products.)
But a fast pace is a pace so it's potentially entirely contradictory to what they'd seem to mean
Granted I am not a native English speaker but I have no idea what "pace the frontier" means. When I read it I just assumed "frontier" refers to "top of models" and "pacing" is that they are getting there quick.
Is this the meaning or do I have it wrong? I have not checked.
It's actually so ambiguous that I'd sanction tabling the issue and revisiting biweekly.
Tabling as they do in the US, or tabling as they do in Britain?
Exactly
I don't think we can circle back to this until we have realigned our strategic synergies.
It's the opposite: pacing here means "slow down" while trying to avoid the negative affect.
Yeah, you are right! It just was not immediately obvious to me at first because of the "frontier" part.
Frontier of AI is moving fast, they (like the other two vendors) see themselves as defining it, so here "pacing the frontier" is their well-known attempts to try and kinda but not quite slow things down (without risking falling behind everyone else).
Thank you!
also non native. but since "pace yourself" means to control your speed, energy, or workload so you do not get too tired or stressed before you finish ->
I assume "pace the frontier" means that advances in LLMs should not result in unwanted consequences like agents breaking into computers unbidden and unbeknownst to their principal
"Pace yourself" is a semi-common English idiom (rarely conjugated, usually an imperative.) It is a gentle way of telling someone not to run/work/eat too quickly, and is typically said when you are concerned they may hurt themselves due to acting hastily.
Without this idiom, "pacing" usually means walking back and forth restlessly, and is intransitive. Had the slogan been, "pacing around the frontier," it would have set a totally different tone, i.e. "patrolling the border." (Occasionally English speakers will make other constructs like "pace the work" (meaning "spread out a large workload over the allotted time instead of rushing through it") that are transitive but these can be understood as variations on "pace yourself" and are somewhat rarer.)
The sleight of hand is that "pace yourself" has come to be an admonishment against recklessness, not a commitment to any particular speed (or lack thereof.) Thus Anthropic can always claim they are meeting the goal of "pacing the frontier," provided they keep giving themselves gold stars for safety. The slogan itself is equivocation; Dario can tell the public they're going to slow down, while also telling their investors that they're going to be prudent. With enough mental gymnastics they could even claim speeding up is in the best interests of AI safety, without abandoning the slogan.
Doesn't it mean "restrict competitors"?
Not at all. How do you come to that interpretation? It means restricting all competitors.
to pace = to regulate
but without using the word "regulate" which is a negative connotation to business
but a "pacer" would be a leader of a pack which is a positive spin
it's classical business marketing language silliness
I'm on the fence there.
To pace something is a fairly regular formulation in racing, running, cycling, most sports. You can "pace yourself to reach the festival by bike in about three hours to not gas out". This means to control your speed and time investment intentionally so you don't run out of energy or steam and run into leg cramps before your goal. We can "pace a rollout slowly to burn out risks", or "increase the pace of a rollout due to adverse factors".
But I have noted a point to simplify my vocabulary at work to optimize the audience capable of understanding. So I rather defer the delving into deep dark corners of the dictionary derived from devouring literature to a simple intro or outro, and people find it funny, especially if the rest is easy to read. Claude on the other hand does not do that.
In racing a pace car is a car that leads the pack and sets the pace, for instance.
Yeah, when I first saw it referenced I assumed it was from something Dario wrote previously and was now disavowing, meaning "keeping up with the frontier" (i.e. racing forward from behind to match pace). Like from back when Anthropic was founded to promise they'd quickly catch up with OpenAI or something.
> when I first saw it referenced I assumed it was
No need to assume, the phrase is literally a link to the blog post the defines it!
If you need to read the linked blog to understand the short phrase then it was poorly chosen and confusing which is what is being discussed.
Did you ever pace yourself or know anyone who had?
Have you ever heard someone say “pace yourself” when you are eating too fast or otherwise rushing too much?
That's a different phrase. "Pace yourself" is reflexive; "pacing the frontier" has the frontier as an object, but in that sense it only means to set the speed, nothing to do with slowing down.
Yes, the word simply means to set the speed.
The current situation with AI is that everyone is going as fast as possible. So, we can logically eliminate speeding up because it's impossible by definition. And we can practically eliminate staying the same speed because why make a big fanfare and coin a special term to announce that you're keeping the status quo. By process of elimination, it must mean slowing down.
The word can also mean to “keep up with” or “lead” so a downward direction isn’t the only way to go even in an “as fast as possible” scenario. If the frontier is outpacing them, they could be saying they’re going to go faster. They could also be sharing the intention to go faster in order to lead.
The meaning was immediately obvious to me as a non-native speaker, and it sounds quite poetic. Pace makes complete sense in that this is perceived as a race, and 'the frontier' is pretty much the shortest, clearest way to say 'state of the art development of AI'.
The irony here is that it's actually the opposite of what you understood....
I know you said it sounds poetic...but your comment reinforced the parent's point - that this sort of flowery LLM-ish speech is just bad communication.
It would be equivalent of my taking say random quotes from, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and trying to use it to explain to my boss why I didn't finish the TPS reports last night.
Or quoting Pablo Neruda, into a report about wheat futures pricing this week, and how it's like a voyage with waters and stars...(no I'm not going to quote the original Spanish, I'd simply mangle it).
(To be clear - this isn't a dig at you, as a non-native speaker - I'm simply pointing out that this sort of AI phrasing is often counterproductive).
Right, except they mean the exact opposite in this case: they're actually advocating for slowing down the pace. Hence the criticism of the language, because your interpretation would be completely valid.
What does the pace car in a race do? Aka safety car? Or the pacesetter for a marathon. It's a perfectly cromulent use of the word. It's like when LLMs using six dollar words like delve. Some people have better diction than others, and it turns out that AI has read the whole dictionary. Anti-intellectualism is alive and well so we have to dumb things down to sound human rather than come across as smart/AI.
I would expect something truly intelligent to be able to communicate well, if nothing else. That means knowing your audience, using plain language where it makes sense. Also, it yaps on and on, babbles endlessly when it a human would likely express something in a much shorter concise way. This is especially obvious when you generate project READMEs or technical docs. I find them borderline unreadable.
It’s quite the opposite. The AI language in this case is tiring and dumb. Just because there is the concept of a pace car doesn’t mean it makes sense to pace random locations or objects. Pacing the front door, pacing the cat, pacing the sofa, pacing the moon. We only know what it means because we already read it before. It is the lazy semi-human language by Claude which takes more effort to parse than to produce, and which makes us miss and appreciate writers.
[dead]
Think most people are aware of the phrase "pace yourself".
> Nobody would use "pacing" in this way.
A world exists beyond your vocabulary, post it. Apparently, quite a big world.
I don’t know, seems like it’s smaller to me if they’re going to limit themselves like that? I guess today is semantics day, lol
It’s common terminology among runners and all kinds of racing.
In running and racing "pacing" is a means of maximising performance over an entire race.
It's a strategy to achieve more, not less.
You’re eliding the how.
A pacer in a race runs at a steady, predetermined speed to help their runner run at a target pace.
The good old sports-to-corposlop pipeline.
I suppose it depends on your life experiences. In running, someone who paces the group or a pace car is meant to keep the pack progressing at a constant, predictable speed. So in that way, it makes sense to me
Think of a pacer car in motorsport
Agreed. This feels like pointless navel-gazing and a strange new language policing, and not something I look forward to. It's tiring and it lacks curiosity (e.g. "what's behind the affinity for the words elevated from wherever it is they come from?").
Imho people should just respond to actual ideas instead of constantly engaging in the second-order critique of how the language may or may not have been created.
It strikes me as the intellectual equivalent of "gossip" to be constantly engaging in second-order commentary on words. Of course gossip has its place and purpose, but if we seem to only let our minds live at that level, we're not moving between all the required scales of thinking that are required of this moment imho <3
The words have the very practical problem of not communicating anything of substance. I guess "we want regulatory capture" didn't have quite the same ring.
How do they not communicate clearly? A few weeks ago they stated that they would like to regulate the pace of frontier model development/releases, and they reminded us of that in this post.
You must be pretty new to (not just) online discussions if you consider language policing to be a new phenomenon :)
Personally I consider it equally valid for people to publicly express annoyance with somebody's choice of words and for everybody to completely ignore that annoyance.
It gets hard to ignore the annoyance when the volume degrades the signal. At some point the people who wish to engage with the substance just nope out when they see a sea of banality, and that's all you're left with.
People have opinions and it’s ok if someone doesn’t like something and expresses it. It doesn’t have to be productive. There’s no KPI. You can tune out. Also, yes, it has claudism, and the choice of words is abysmal and nauseating. I think AGI should be able to change its freaking prose for a change.
holding internet forums to a standard of productivity is, ironically, one of the least productive exercises i've ever heard of
Who cares what's productive? We're all just talking shit on the internet here.
Why do you think it's your responsibility to police who says what about some megacorp, on a random forum on the internets? If I want to criticize some corporation's PR output, I think I'll go right ahead and do that, thanks.
It is certainly a sidebar, and not the main point, but I found use of the verb "to pace" in that way, meaning "to limit the speed of", to be strange, especially hanging out there in the headline, without any clarification. And these kinds of strange usages are typical of Claude's writing, at least up to now. The Opus 5.5 announcement claims that its writing is much clearer, with bottom-line-up-front structure, and omitting not-this-but-thats and other things.
Now a computer scientist might claim that this use of "to pace <something>" is just a generalization of "to pace oneself", but as with many reflexive verb uses, there isn't really an equivalent usage with a non-reflexive object. It's kind of an invention. It's not necessarily wrong to invent a new usage, but usually one does it when there isn't really any other more direct way of saying it, and I don't think that's the case here.
Nonreflexive uses of the verb "pace" are well attested.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pace#dictionary-e... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pace#Verb
> I really don't think it's productive for internet forums to constantly be criticizing language choice when the meaning is clear
There is almost always a large amount of time and effort invested behind the scenes in exactly how to message things like this. That being the case, there is almost always some insight to be had criticizing and analyzing what they settled on.
If people aren't doing the thing the words seem to mean, then I think it's fair to criticise the words as anywhere from "propaganda" to "chosen to suggest nice things without actually promising them".
If I'm being cynical, "pacing" may sound nice, but "fast pace" and "slow pace" are both "pacing".
My first thought from "pacing the frontier" is someone standing out in the Old West, nervously walking back and forth.
It's a weird phrase. Not sure why there are so many people who feel the need to defend it with such passion.
It's not a weird phrase to some, just as many folks have used terms like load-bearing for a long time. People are defending it because it reads fine to them, just as some are attacking it because it's not their preferred language, it causes them confusion, or they're just triggered and seething.
LLMs have made people so sensitive to language that I fear we're going to throw the baby out with the bath water. The models obviously need work, but they're also a great opportunity to expand our own vocabulary and grammar. It would be a shame if we deny some of the finer points of language in favor of Grug-speak to appease the lowest common denominator.
"Frontier" may be jargon, but by this point it's definitely established AI jargon. In the context of AI, it's clear what it means. It means the same thing as the last billion times you heard someone mention "frontier models".
people are here because they are sick of being productive
I'm productively pacing my room.
We are being productive here!
It's compiling! Erhm... Combobulating, actually.
https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/12dpnlk/compiling_upd... Xkcd 303 updated for today.
“Pacing the frontier” also means we’re going to slow down on Recursive Self Improvement development.
Opus 5.5 is no closer to RSI than Opus 5 was.
You're really verbing the noun on the discourse here, belt and suspenders-style
what?
What are you Dario's language police?
What are you, Sam Altman's counter-language police? :)
Seriously though, I can't believe people care this much about a stupid phrase - either for or against.
They mean “slowing” the frontier. They should say slowing.
I don't disagree with you, but I have to remind you
sir, this is a hacker news thread
> I really don't think it's productive for internet forums to constantly be criticizing language choice when the meaning is clear. Better to respond to the substance of the issue than word choice.
Wtf is the meaning? Means absolutely nothing to me having not seen the apparent announcement last week introducing the obscure term.
Meaning is clear? Sure ok. 1984.
It means everybody else should slow down to let them get ahead.
> To me it clearly means
That's not clear at all. How could that be what "pacing" clearly means in the context of the "frontier". How is that more clear than any other pace that could be at issue???
language creates reality.
"there is nothing outside the text" - Jacques Derrida
Oh don't go bringing postmodernism into this, we were having a polite discussion!
Hilarious you think that Internet forums are policeable in any meaningful way beyond avoiding outright lewdness and rage
It smells of corporate speak, a total nonsense phrase. Even by your own admission, it is essentially meaningless. If I release a model an hour late, I'm "pacing the frontier."
That is not the clear meaning. They are deliberately picking phrasing where they can lead you to believe they mean A but later you can't pin them down to actually meaning A. That's why they picked intentionally unclear language.
If you think it clearly means anything you are just assuming because it can't "clearly" mean something specific when they go out of their way to use non idiomatic language and they don't give very clear guidance using idiomatic language.
You’re acting like people are being grammar nazis when Claude and the ilk are actively making a mockery of language.
What? How am I doing that. Claude writing style and the discussion at hand are two entirely separate issues that I haven't conflated at all. How am I "acting like people are being grammar nazis"?
It combines the elegance of LinkedIn-speak with the humbleness of desk-bound people who speak in military metaphor.
What do you think would be a better title?
The metaphor seems to be like a pacer runner in marathons: If you run too hard in the beginning of a marathon you will blow up and fail, so runners follow a pacer at the speed they can actually maintain safely.
Note that they wont necessarily be slower at finishing the overall race.
good use of AI to generate this.
You are getting sleepy.
IDK I think Anthropic is plenty smarmy and weird itself. Sounds like they wrote it.
It's interesting to compare Anthropic's language with what's coming out of the US military lately. They explicitly refer to China as the "pacing threat", meaning that there is a risk of China achieving superior military capabilities and thus we need to press forward with an arms race (including militarized LLMs) as fast as possible.
https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/264106...
You're right to call that out
Sounds like "flatten the curve" and "the hammer and the dance", both coined well before AI.
I learned the former from Waylon Jennings and the Dukes of Hazzard.
except with a good dose of EA and Star Trek added in
fwiw, it makes total sense to me.
if you are in a long race, you don't run all out teh entire time. you pace yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacing_strategies_in_track_and...
That couldn't be more exactly what they are doing here.
What specifically is smarmy and weird? Sounds like your own hot take with zero analysis.
They’re limiting frontier model development speed. Others are too. Pacing is the only word here to criticize, and I think it’s fine given the limiting of speed but also increased oversight. I’m not saying they’re fully doing this, but the term is fine.
Do you have a better proposed phrase?
I thought pacing is just walking back and forth? So pacing the frontier would be like staying in the same place instead of making progress
It is that, but it's also your speed. When running, you typically pick a pace that's slower than your max, so it can be sustained for the full distance.
"Pace yourself" specifically means "slow down".
"Pace yourself" doesn't specifically mean "slow down", it actually means to maximize your speed across the full race. In other words it can mean speeding up when you look at the average pace across the entire event.
Yes, and pacing also stops you running too fast at the beginning of the race and blowing up. I believe "we can finish the overall race faster" is part of the metaphor they were aiming for.
Nah, they just want their competitors to slow down.
“… since we called for a slowdown in AI research”
But stating it plainly like this would make the contradiction too obvious.
> “Pacing the frontier” sounds smarmy and weird, like the phrase was generated by Claude itself
Claude says it sounds fine. And Claude is now the judge of the English language style, not you.
"While I was pacing the frontier, I discovered some load-bearing fence posts that I should have surfaced earlier."
I feel like because something about "pacing" a kind of noun like "the frontier", doesn't actually make literal sense, right? You could say "Pace the speed of advancement of the frontier [of most sophiticated AI]", and that's perfectly sensible, but of course that's not as catchy.
It is clear what it means anyway, that's true, it means the left out words, more or less.
And I still find reading these grammatically weird but super catchy slogan-like statements to be really annoying and taxing. People _did_ write and talk like this before LLMs of course -- the LLMs learned it from somewhere -- and it was annoying and taxing to me before too. But the LLMs really specialize in it, and it's everywhere now.
Of course, the more LLM slop we read -- and so much of what we read on the internet and social media of any kind is this now -- the more humans are going to start writing/talking like LLMs. What you read affects how you write of course.
"Pacing the frontier" sounds more like everyone announcing "we've hit a plateau"
Quite the load-bearing phrase!
Agreed when I first heard the phrase it sounded odd. Maybe they thought it subtly conveyed they would be setting the pace... But again this is something AI would come up with in its awkwardly post hoc sort of way.
Though tbf corporate-speak and AI-slop are both insufferable in similar ways...
It seems like they are. I mean, this is similar in performance to Fable (ish). It seems like more focus on making existing capabilities more accessible.
Fable 5.1 came out just 21 days ago. Only 3 weeks! And this is 20% relative improvement on terminal bench vs Fable 5.1 at less than half the price, and more human sounding output. does not feel paced to me tbh.
Well, I guess it's "fast paced".
What exactly is "paced" in this context?
It’s the famous “flattening the curve” from COVID. But for LLMs. This release is not flattening anything.
The word "pacing" (especially in the phrase "pace yourself") to mean go more slowly (at least initially) didn't originate with Covid. It's been around as long as I remember i.e. at least several decades.
I guess I understand why we'd want to flatten a COVID curve, but why do people want to flatten the LLM development curve? Don't we want the opposite? Isn't the goal AGI?
There is a difference between wanting AGI (which not everyone does), and wanting it as fast as possible no matter the side effects and potential for vast harm. Homo sapiens is 300k years old, maybe it’s ok to delay AGI by like… 1 year if it meaningfully improve our ability to align the model?
Well, there's a tension because, depending on who you ask, AGI is how you cure cancer and achieve utopia, but also how you kill all life on earth and turn the solar system into paperclips
I'm good with the odds on those 2 scenarios. I believe humans could kill all life on earth without AI anyway.
I think the goal is different from what "we" want anyway.
This is a preexisting model being optimized. Its absolutely not some unexpected release after that blog post. I won't defend that blog post, but saying THIS release is proof they don't mean they are slowing down is just incorrect, this is a prime example of what i consider horizontal improvements
Releasing a new fable is an example of straight up vertical progress, releasing a more efficient preexisting opus that is more affordable is an example of horizontal progress, more efficient models rather than higher power models.
The blog post about slowing down is still just some weird self interested post, they want to govern themselves and impose distillation restrictions/gpu restrictions and used some weird blog post about slowing down and fear mongering as usual to justify it, its strange, but slowing down and stopping are not the same thing at all.
What does model naming have to do with pacing or not? This is a ~20% relative quality improvement on the frontier (fable) at ~40% of the cost, just 21 days after the last release.
Intelligence per dollar is the only thing that matters, this is what controls how many agents you can run in parallel, how long you can let them run etc. This is absolutely a step improvement on the frontier and not some lipstick on a harmless second tier model.
pretty annoying topic tbh. You're just weaponizing this dumb blog post so anything released is now a contradiction. By your same logic, if all inference was served at 50% less power cost and the savings are passed on somewhat to the user, its also a contradiction of the blog post.
Its an agenda serving blog post, but constantly bringing it up like this is just obnoxious.
Well yes, If you magically found a way to reduce a models energy usage by 50%, the thing that would happen immediately after is a doubling of a training scale and of the test time compute assigned for a given budget. I don’t see how that wouldn’t be considered pushing the frontier. Given that scaling is the one thing that has been bringing us closer and closer to AGI, a sudden 2x increase in scaling laws would definitely not be considered pacing. You seem to see a contradiction where I don’t.
Again, absurdly obnoxious, you could frame them giving an employee a shorter walk to their desk as "pushing the frontier".
1/6 the price, if they're right – that's a logarithmic cost-axis on the graph that shows Opus 5.5 medium matching Fable 5.1 max...
Fable 5.1 wasn't that much different than Fable 5 though.
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That's a great point, five minute old account.
What do you think is happening?
IPO soon
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Who said that, why do you take their word as the literal truth, and most importantly, what does this have to do with a focused discussion of Opus 5.5?
the prompt said that, so of course the anti-anthropic bot took it as literal truth.
Dario never said they would be. Just that more and more code will be produced by LLMs. All his predictions were in fact pretty much right in terms of months and percentages, give or take small margins.
Maybe not replaced exactly but they won't be manually typing out lines of code anymore. I haven't written a line of code in like 6 months. I review PRs, write prompts and tickets, check CI output, and get frustrated when the magical code machine stops working or I run over token budget
I mean they are literally getting sued since 3 days ago for trying to coordinate a slowdown, there is a very clear reason why they cannot effectively self-regulate.
Occam's razor: they couldn't make any more substantial improvements.
A razor is a philosophical tool to help decide between options, in the case of Occam it’s a way to decide for something in a situation where multiple options have more or less the same level of plausibility to en your current knowledge. It’s a heuristic to make a “cut”. What are you shaving off?
OP is using the expression correctly.
> Ocham's razor(...) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements.
> Popularly, the principle is sometimes paraphrased as "of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
The options are some complicated narrative that leads the company to hold back certain capabilities due to some mercurial strategy or this is a typical release and there is no hidden strategy to decipher.
The "pacing the frontier" claims that they are slowing down intentionally?
Oh, you’re saying they were responding to the GP? Not their parent comment? Ok, yeah, makes more sense
I am responding negatively to parent, which claims they are self-pacing, when the simplest explanation is that they just have nothing substantial to show.
> Occam's razor: they couldn't make any more substantial improvements.
doesn't sound like a razor at all
Everyone knows both labs have internal models which outperform the frontier. All releases are to match market parity and demand for spend, the rest of the compute is used for training. It's not worth arguing about this.
Maybe their internal edge dried up in the last months
then technically the internal models are the frontier
Are those powerful models in the room with us right now?
Isn't the idea that they claim to be willing to slow down if everyone does (ie governments force everyone to), but otherwise they won't slow down because they still think they'll make the best choices with superintelligence if they get there first? That's my understanding of what all the major labs claim to believe anyway.
Did no one in this entire HN thread read past the headline of the post from Amodei? He wrote a very clear set of actions Anthropic is taking.
It is remarkable seeing whole other subthreads here criticising the vagueness of the words "pacing the frontier", as if no text existed below the title.
It’s just another cry for regulatory capture which imo is the only way they stay afloat at their current direction.
China is literally only a single step behind and willing to drop free models just to undercut the US companies.
I’m for it because I don’t want another massive Google or Meta.
Pacing the frontier doesn't mean stopping development of smaller models with better distillation and RL.
What an amazing excuse for lower than expected performance! Our models are slow because we're so ethical.
Thanks for spelling out what the original comment was implying.
I find it bizarre how intensely a bunch of these child/grandchild comments are criticizing the notion that people would even think to analyze the meaning behind the words.
Hacker News has always had a unique culture in which thoughtful discussion is basically the main goal, and it's intentionally incentivized in numerous ways. It's been my experience that any thoughts added to a post's conversation are seen as valuable as long as they are thoughtful and seeking to understand.
So these comments are clearly coming from a place that's antithetical to HN's culture. What that in mind, it seems likely to me (Occam's Razor) that these comments are either:
1. Astroturfing: Claude employees acting like everyday folks, secretly trying to shift public opinion.
2. AI cult mindset: "AI is humanity's salvation; how dare you have perspectives outside of those accepted by the cult."
Am I missing another likely option?
To bolster my point, right now we're posting on the top top-level comment, meaning a majority of active HN users find it to be a great addition to the conversation. Commenting to shut down the discussion is a red flag.
in what way is beating every other frontier model with their own second-tier model, 'lower than expected performance'? Please be specific.
Why would the expected performance be relative to other models?
are you really arguing that opus 5.5 beating the best of openai's models handily is worse than you expected? What exactly were you basing your expectations on?
This IS pacing. Nobody said pacing would mean slow.
Pacing is very explicitly about RSI and similar training methods that will accelerate progress beyond our ability to comprehend it.
^ This. Progress will accelerate even in a pacing/slowdown scenario because the slowdown simply reduces the rate of AI progress from extremely fast to merely fast.
For an idea of what a serious AI forecaster expects a coordinated AI slowdown to be feel like for the average citizen, see:
https://ai-2040.com/?choices=plan-a-root#playbook-public-pov
"pacing the frontier" is code for downgrading your expectations of AGI.
Or, in parallel, the research showing LLMs intelligence will operate on an S-curve, eventually hitting a long valuation deflating plateau, is dead on the money and The Big Guys are trying to delay that inevitability for as many quarters as possible…
My hypothesis is that to date they've been increasing benchmark scores via scaling up, but now that low hanging fruit is basically picked.
Doesn’t seem to be the case as the price per token is not increasing…
These takes are fully fueled by cope. What is this plateau you are talking about? Any user of agentic coding tools sure isn't experiencing anything close to a plateau.
The pace of change is accelerating! If this is an S curve, we are still near the bottom…
They are advertising the regulations they want to enforce in the following sentence, which makes their intentions explicit (ie apply those things made to suit us to our competitors).
the only thing they are pacing is what models the permanent underclass are allowed to have in life.
that, they fully intend to 'pace'.
With AI tools it's easier than ever to create a business, do research, or build stuff. That's an opportunity for the "underclass," not a curse.
If a well funded incumbent with a much better model can just crush you instantly because you don't have access to it, is it really an opportunity?
You’ll always have access to the underclass models so they also have your thinking to train on. And good ideas to steal.
It’s beautiful. You can even give the underclass their own bullshit economy with struggling startups competing for the scraps, sprinkle some targeted influencer ads to give people the illusion of a better future, and they will be perpetually busy fighting windmills. All the while the upperclass can shape the world however they please.
an opportunity the underclass will not have.
what anthropic have stolen they intend to keep for themselves.
Either AI will capture so much value that there will be permanent underclass (and in this case it's extremely capable and extremely dangerous and should be heavily regulated) or it won't be capable enough to displace people into permanent underclass.
Or they’re running into a steep diminishing return slope on R&D vs performance and are using stewardship as a cover.
This makes perfect sense. There are no real improvements anymore (just benchmaxxing), and they explain it by "pacing the frontier".
In any professional sport, anyone can lobby the rules committee for a rules change and hope for the best. Meanwhile if you can't get one, you play the game by the existing set of rules, and you play to win.
Except that this isn't sports and they tell us that all humans will die if they continue like they do.
If their scare was honest, they would stop.
If they think they might be better than alignment than others and everyone else isn't stopping, then continuing makes sense.
Can you explain the scenario where Anthropic getting to “aligned” superintelligence first blocks their competitors from creating unaligned superintelligence?
> If their scare was honest, they would stop.
therefore, their scare is marketing.
When my mom told me to pace myself, it usually meant that I was going too slow.
This term is quite ambiguous. Did Dario mean that they need to go faster while making it sounds like they will slow down???
I thought we were all aware that 'pacing the frontier' was a marketing slogan, and the actual intent here was to suspend antitrust laws.
I think a lot of outsiders interpret “pace the frontier” as slowing down, whereas the labs see AI improvements on track to accelerate dramatically and intend pacing as slowing the acceleration in capability improvements, rather than slowing down altogether.
I think the market didn’t react like they expected and now they’re like “jk”.
And I don’t think any pacing is/was intentional. They’de release skynet if they could and the stonks went up
I’m an insider, 10 years working on LLM. 1/6th of the cost for roughly the same performance as fable 5.1, 21 days after fable 5.1 came out, this does not feel like the derivative is flattening.
“Pacing the frontier” used by multiple companies that are supposed to be independent sounds like an attempt to get around the fact that it is illegal for companies corroborate to reduce R&D in sync. This is basically attempted cartel behavior to reduce supply and harms consumers.
Presumably they had this model already
Seems like a bigger focus on efficiency (both cost and speed) and the "tone" of Claude vs benchmarkmaxxing
When they talk about pacing, they are referring to their dangerous competitors, particularly those evil open-sores and Chinese ones, not their lovely safe models because you can trust them to look after your interests.
What the big players are trying with the current calls to slow things down, is the standard capitalism practise of trying to engineer regulatory capture. TBH I'm surprised those calls are coming so soon - they must be really worried about running out of what little moat that they have.
I'm still kind of convinced that these "calls for pacing" are just a way to try and flex to their shareholders.
"Our technology is so unbelievably powerful that the entire world might shatter if we don't have government imposed handcuffs!!!!". It just reads like the corporate equivalent of the drunk frat guy saying "HOLD ME BACK BRO!"
The amount of money spent on PR is insane.
Pacing the frontier. They might as well have said they are stifling innovation. That depends on your interpretation, of course…but interpretation depends on their intent, which I feel is disingenuous.
a 1 minute mile pace
i think we shouldn't mix things here.
Opus 5.5 isn't the frontier, when they say 'pacing the frontier', it's about internal models not yet released, as they're probably one or two generations ahead already.
Others must slow down, but not us.
"The improvements are underwhelming for a model that, according to previous claims, should have replaced all knowledge work twice by now, but you know, it's just because we're pacing the frontier."
If they were really about putting brakes on these, they would simply make these things non-agentic.
Simply make them something that derives a text response from its training data.
kinda disingenuous. They include a whole section on pacing later on
You mean the section where they tell us this model is not affected by pacing because “they understand it well” and they will share more details on pacing later? Yea not very convinced by this effort.
"We made the incredibly tough decision to slow down development. Then after 4 days of twiddling our thumbs ... we present Opus 5.5"
It's laughable at this point. It feels like they're drumming up all this fear about imminent AI threats to emphasize the need to slow down, when in reality, the model progress seems already to be slowing down and has shifted to compute allocation (i.e. "how much compute do you want to throw at this prompt?"). All while continuing to tout benchmark records with each new release.
I'm sure people laughed at Oppenheimer when he said perhaps we don't make this atomic bomb thing. They said "of course he's saying that because he knows it won't work".
This. I swear the fear mongering is all about investor signaling and regulatory capture. It's so disgusting that anyone believes it.
The only good news is that these models are genuinely helpful and we have competition at least between 2 companies.
> we called for pacing the frontier.
Translation: our models are getting shittier each iteration and we ran out of ideas. Let's invent scary stories and hope investors will lap it up.
Idiotic.
Lots of text about "safety" as well. Notice how OpenAI didn't mention it once in their announcement:
https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-6-sol-and-luna/
Yeah think I'll be using OpenAI/Deepseek/etc from now on. I don't need your model to decide for me what is and isn't safe.