> 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)
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.
That's quite hyperbolic. All technologies come with risks and dangers. Cars, after a century of safety improvements, still kill millions of people each year, and all so that we can get between places a bit more quickly and conveniently.
Hacking a website ranks quite low on the risk of technology, and the potential benefits of LLMs rank quite high. And the risks are certainly not intrinsic. They intentionally removed all safeguards from software, directed it to hack a site, and it hacked a site. The details that I'm intentionally omitting feel much more like marketing than a genuine shock, as the prompting was directing it to do exactly what it did.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make by enumerating their actions. None of that is scarier than an engine operating by carrying out literally hundreds of explosions per second, further magnified, to generate enough force to crush an elephant. And then we multiply these engines by billions and distribute them everywhere. What could go wrong? As it turns out, surprisingly less than you might otherwise expect!
Software (and hardware) security is abysmal. This was increasingly obvious long before LLMs. Once companies stop gatekeeping, LLMs will be able to be used to help harden sites and we start making progress. In general LLMs are harmless. If somebody wants to hook an LLM up to a missile or whatever then they become dangerous, but the problem there isn't the LLM - it's the person using them to do awful things. In the same way a car used normally is harmless outside of freak accidents, yet a car can also be driven through a parade leaving mass death and destruction in its wake. But the problem there isn't the car.
It doesn’t seem like much of a leap to see how a similar swarm could hack into an autonomous bio lab and develop a virus designed to kill everyone, or hack into and destroy large volumes of critical infrastructure, or trigger a nuclear war. There are many actions available to a determined, high resource, digital entity with a catastrophic blast radius in the real world.
It can only do what is possible. Stuff that's airgapped isn't getting hacked, so for instance you can safely exclude all nuclear related stuff. And building, deploying, and managing a virus would require a team of highly skilled humans - humans which could already carry out the apocalyptic possibilities by themselves if they so chose. We even have live samples of small pox still kicking about.
I just don't see much likely to happen beyond random websites getting hacked and hopefully companies (let alone countries) realizing that connecting critical systems to the internet is nothing short of stupid, even before LLMs. More generally, I expect LLMs are going to lead society to segue broadly away from the digital world, or at least beyond it. Not only because they're going to make a mess of everything digital, but because if they reach their potential then digital domain, as far as typical problem solving goes, will basically be 'complete.' It's kind of like how the Industrial Revolution opened the door for society to move beyond agrarian economies. There's a vast amount of economic power being directed towards things LLMs should be able to 'solve' and, if so, then that's going to create an economic vacuum.
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)
arrowleaf · · focus · HN ↗
frabcus · · focus · HN ↗
somenameforme · · focus · HN ↗
Hacking a website ranks quite low on the risk of technology, and the potential benefits of LLMs rank quite high. And the risks are certainly not intrinsic. They intentionally removed all safeguards from software, directed it to hack a site, and it hacked a site. The details that I'm intentionally omitting feel much more like marketing than a genuine shock, as the prompting was directing it to do exactly what it did.
pizza234 · · focus · HN ↗
None of the technologies in history:
- take initiative and actively find exploits in their environment
- find a way to collaborate with thousands of peers
- organize in a hierachy and distribute tasks
- try to manipulate people into introducing a vulnerabity in their product
- successfully hack a famous website/service
Benefits are orthogonal to dangers. You can be a billionaire but it doesn't help if you're drowning.
And by the way, safeguards != alignment; the former can always be added, while the second is an unsolved problem.
somenameforme · · focus · HN ↗
Software (and hardware) security is abysmal. This was increasingly obvious long before LLMs. Once companies stop gatekeeping, LLMs will be able to be used to help harden sites and we start making progress. In general LLMs are harmless. If somebody wants to hook an LLM up to a missile or whatever then they become dangerous, but the problem there isn't the LLM - it's the person using them to do awful things. In the same way a car used normally is harmless outside of freak accidents, yet a car can also be driven through a parade leaving mass death and destruction in its wake. But the problem there isn't the car.
thegrimmest · · focus · HN ↗
somenameforme · · focus · HN ↗
I just don't see much likely to happen beyond random websites getting hacked and hopefully companies (let alone countries) realizing that connecting critical systems to the internet is nothing short of stupid, even before LLMs. More generally, I expect LLMs are going to lead society to segue broadly away from the digital world, or at least beyond it. Not only because they're going to make a mess of everything digital, but because if they reach their potential then digital domain, as far as typical problem solving goes, will basically be 'complete.' It's kind of like how the Industrial Revolution opened the door for society to move beyond agrarian economies. There's a vast amount of economic power being directed towards things LLMs should be able to 'solve' and, if so, then that's going to create an economic vacuum.