Comment by sailingparrot
7 hours ago
> 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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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.
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> 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.
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people are here because they are sick of being productive
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“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
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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
Meaning is clear? Sure ok. 1984.
> 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.
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
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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.
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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.
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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
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“… 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...
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.
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?
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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.
[flagged]
That's a great point, five minute old account.
What do you think is happening?
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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?
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> 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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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> 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!"
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.
The amount of money spent on PR is insane.
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.
a 1 minute mile pace
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.