> 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.
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.
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 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.
They care about both, and those goals are intertwined. Mirroring the core of alignment problem itself, the only way to have influence on the pace of the race is to be one of the winning players - if they fall off to the back, they cannot do anything about it anymore.
> the only way to have influence on the pace of the race is to be one of the winning players
Yeah I don't buy that, every additional player is just adding fuel to the fire.
Would the cold war be "safer" if it were US, Russia and a 3rd player? Of course not, it would just make it harder to coordinate any safety measures.
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.
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. 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.)
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)
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.
A more simple explanation I think, is that people on this forum aren't big on AI companies at the moment, and they're looking for things to dislike.
In this case that means three words that are perfectly clear are being endlessly overanalyzed.
To me, this entire reply thread is such a phenomenal waste of human effort. A shame. I would expect more from this site.
From my dabbling with policy writing and legalese, English kinda _is_ a programming language, but one with ambiguity as a first class principal. Sometimes you would like to say something that seems normal at first blush, but gives you the latitude you need to mean something different at the time it is actually being evaluated in a situation that matters. Weasel words, for instance, serve a purpose even if we eschew them. The idea is that it is deliberately NOT formally declaring the exact meaning of something, nor the fact that it is not doing this. How could you really do that in code without calling attention to the very thing you're trying to obscure?
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 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 some tech lingo.
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.
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).
"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."
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.
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
I am also not a native speaker. I thought it was clear it meant slowing down the rate of progress so we have time to consider the matter and develop tools or systems around it before.
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.
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'.
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.
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).
It's just that the choice of object is weird.
"Pacing our progress" or "pacing development" is more usual. "Pacing the frontier" I guess is a shorthand for "Pacing [the development of] frontier [models]"
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
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.
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.
sailingparrot · · focus · HN ↗
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.
mukmuk · · focus · HN ↗
DiggyJohnson · · focus · HN ↗
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.
post-it · · focus · HN ↗
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.
sigmar · · focus · HN ↗
nradov · · focus · HN ↗
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
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.
phlakaton · · focus · HN ↗
mupuff1234 · · focus · HN ↗
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
Also note that this release isn't a model capability improvement, but a cost and efficiency (and style) improvement.
mupuff1234 · · focus · HN ↗
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
mupuff1234 · · focus · HN ↗
Yeah I don't buy that, every additional player is just adding fuel to the fire.
Would the cold war be "safer" if it were US, Russia and a 3rd player? Of course not, it would just make it harder to coordinate any safety measures.
idiotsecant · · focus · HN ↗
You are all getting mad about absolutely the dumbest thing when there are giant things to be worried about here.
nradov · · focus · HN ↗
victorhooi · · focus · HN ↗
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)
manlymuppet · · focus · HN ↗
jamiek88 · · focus · HN ↗
antod · · focus · HN ↗
eg "pacing the frontier" could also mean they are impatiently or anxiously walking up and down the border.
smelendez · · focus · HN ↗
pegasus · · focus · HN ↗
InsideOutSanta · · focus · HN ↗
heroiccocoa · · focus · HN ↗
manlymuppet · · focus · HN ↗
In this case that means three words that are perfectly clear are being endlessly overanalyzed.
To me, this entire reply thread is such a phenomenal waste of human effort. A shame. I would expect more from this site.
mikestorrent · · focus · HN ↗
1attice · · focus · HN ↗
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
rcxdude · · focus · HN ↗
Avicebron · · focus · HN ↗
bee_rider · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
bryan_w · · focus · HN ↗
rob74 · · focus · HN ↗
astrange · · focus · HN ↗
freejazz · · focus · HN ↗
johnisgood · · focus · HN ↗
Is this the meaning or do I have it wrong? I have not checked.
wren6991 · · focus · HN ↗
johnisgood · · focus · HN ↗
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
johnisgood · · focus · HN ↗
lxgr · · focus · HN ↗
bityard · · focus · HN ↗
r_lee · · focus · HN ↗
ventana · · focus · HN ↗
testdelacc1 · · focus · HN ↗
ck2 · · focus · HN ↗
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
LanceH · · focus · HN ↗
DiggyJohnson · · focus · HN ↗
rhet0rica · · focus · HN ↗
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."
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.
melasadra · · focus · HN ↗
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
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
derac · · focus · HN ↗
jamiek88 · · focus · HN ↗
qlte · · focus · HN ↗
stagger87 · · focus · HN ↗
No need to assume, the phrase is literally a link to the blog post the defines it!
irpap · · focus · HN ↗
arw0n · · focus · HN ↗
hencq · · focus · HN ↗
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
nradov · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
icedchai · · focus · HN ↗
irpap · · focus · HN ↗
victorhooi · · focus · HN ↗
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).
squidbeak · · focus · HN ↗
A world exists beyond your vocabulary, post it. Apparently, quite a big world.
wavewrangler · · focus · HN ↗
browningstreet · · focus · HN ↗
lxgr · · focus · HN ↗
logifail · · focus · HN ↗
It's a strategy to achieve more, not less.
browningstreet · · focus · HN ↗
A pacer in a race runs at a steady, predetermined speed to help their runner run at a target pace.
logifail · · focus · HN ↗
You're eliding the why :)
> to help their runner run at a target pace
To help their runner get from the start to the end of the race faster (or indeed at all). In short: to increase performance.
Pacing isn't a neutral thing.
browningstreet · · focus · HN ↗
bogdanoff_2 · · focus · HN ↗
neo_doom · · focus · HN ↗
tetha · · focus · HN ↗
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.
Leynos · · focus · HN ↗
staindk · · focus · HN ↗
doctoboggan · · focus · HN ↗
jgwil2 · · focus · HN ↗
adrianmonk · · focus · HN ↗
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.
cgriswald · · focus · HN ↗
JackFr · · focus · HN ↗
mattjoyce · · focus · HN ↗