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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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".
> 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.
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???
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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'.
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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.
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It’s common terminology among runners and all kinds of racing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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
what?
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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
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".
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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...