> 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.
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)
> 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.
The clearest limit right now is GPUs, and anyone giving up their allocation will be rerouted elsewhere in the world (NVIDIA is already sold out for the next year). I think you're underestimating competitiveness of the current market if you think Anthropic stopping right now wouldn't be absorbed by all others reasonably quickly. Your 50% figure is highly doubtful if you see how many players there are now.
Your idea of "making a start" (giving up their position) also would mean they couldn't really do anything else to solve the problem afterwards(?). Sometimes you can improve what's happening in a room more by staying in that room.
> Oh, so they're killing people's opportunities and jobs because they want to help people?
To be clear: Dario has talked about worries of jobs etc in the past, wanting society to prepare more for it, but the safety issues they're talking about with pacing seem to be focused more on their existential/AGI worries, not jobs/electricity etc. If someone truly believes in the existential worries (which they seem to: they wrote and published about it long before Anthropic was founded, and have directly made costly decisions based on it, like blocking their own models' capabilities) it trumps the other worries for them. At least that's my reading.
To be fair, there are other accelerators beyond GPUs, and the sooner people broaden out from nVidia and unlock a more open, more competitive ecosystem, the better. Allowing one company to control the flow of such a critical resource is just asking for problems.
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.
mpalczewski · · focus · HN ↗
mitchdoogle · · focus · HN ↗
epolanski · · focus · HN ↗
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.
usef- · · focus · HN ↗
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)
spwa4 · · focus · HN ↗
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.
usef- · · focus · HN ↗
Your idea of "making a start" (giving up their position) also would mean they couldn't really do anything else to solve the problem afterwards(?). Sometimes you can improve what's happening in a room more by staying in that room.
> Oh, so they're killing people's opportunities and jobs because they want to help people?
To be clear: Dario has talked about worries of jobs etc in the past, wanting society to prepare more for it, but the safety issues they're talking about with pacing seem to be focused more on their existential/AGI worries, not jobs/electricity etc. If someone truly believes in the existential worries (which they seem to: they wrote and published about it long before Anthropic was founded, and have directly made costly decisions based on it, like blocking their own models' capabilities) it trumps the other worries for them. At least that's my reading.
mikestorrent · · focus · HN ↗
andsoitis · · focus · HN ↗
They created said resource. They didn’t mine it.
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗