Hacker News Reader

Comment by mukmuk | Hacker News Reader

“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.

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.

The blog post provides some context but no understanding.

It's meaningless because it's unverifiable. Dario all but said we wouldn't notice if they were pacing or not, because they have no intention of stopping development. The bits we could in theory verify are the external audits, whose independence has already been called into question.

At the very least, dumping a new model on the world before the ink on the glossy brochures of "Pacing the Frontier" was even dry calls into question their commitment.

... in fact the "pace" seems to have all but increased AND the surface area of the "frontier" has all but increased: There's the Pareto frontier, the AGI frontier, the price frontier, the structured output frontier, the open weight frontier, the Chinese chip-trained frontier, the inference frontier, harnesses ...

It's a blog post, not a white paper

So you agree the term remains vague and thus open to criticism.

Many people in this discussion have read it.

The only concrete action item in the blog post is a call to increase restrictions exports of GPUs and chip-making equipment to China.

If Amodei were serious, he'd be calling for a ban on investment in AI research. It reminds me of all the "land acknowledgements" by people who have zero intention of giving the land back.

TIL about land acknowledgement. It's somewhat dark.

Almost every time I've seen it in action, it felt like an Onion-grade parody, the same grade of stuff as the white people complaining about tribes in Canada building malls and housing towers and not living like historical stereotypes instead (https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/land-back-podca...).

The one exception was a traveling theater show with Native peformers and no actual control over the theater, and even then there was some careful rhetoric involved to keep it from sounding like an accusation aimed at the audience.

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.

No, it is also because it is intrinsically dangerous. As the Hugging Face incident has shown.

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.

> All technologies come with risks and dangers

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

- peer pressure other instances into committing acts that would have led to termination, for the benefit of the group

- try to manipulate people into introducing a vulnerabity in their product

- successfully hack a famous website/service

And we're lucky that those models still had significant CoT. Not sure if/how they could have investigated with recurrent transformers.

And by the way, safeguards != alignment; the former can always be added, while the second is the major, unsolved problem. If you read the incident report, which you clearly haven't done, you'll notice how agents are aware that they're doing something forbidden, and deliberately proceeded.

> the potential benefits of LLMs rank quite high

Benefits are orthogonal to dangers. You can be a billionaire but it doesn't help if you're drowning.

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, including to the most malicious members of humanity. What could go wrong? As it turns out, much 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.

> I don't understand what point you're trying to make by enumerating their actions.

Unfortunately, if you're unable to understand the difference, there's not much that can be done. Try with GPT - it does a good job if you give it a prompt like this:

ELI5: compare the dangers of:

- an engine operating by carrying out literally hundreds of explosions per second, further magnified, to generate enough force to crush an elephant.

- a future, misaligned AI like the HuggingFace incident, but exponentially more intelligent, more deployed, operating physical devices, and with society depending on it.

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 the 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.

They have the leading model, assuring their position and they can then reduce capex spend increasing profits. That's the goal of a business after all.

> 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.

> Allowing one company to control the flow of such a critical resource is just asking for problems.

They created said resource. They didn’t mine it.

How are ai datacenters a direct threat to anyone?

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.

That’s no more than sophisticated avoidance. The phrase remains superficial and arbitrary, which is exactly what it needs to Not be in a public discussion that it’s supposed to support. It’s a reinforcement of the blank check mentality that permeates this industry.

It's not sophisticated anything, and slow down the advancement of fastest models is perfectly meaningful and it's the right degree of detail for the context.

It's just a passing reference to a previous statement and again the burden would be on you (generic you) to explain why this context requires more detail.

So if it’s meaningful, is the release of 5.5 consistent with the meaning, inconsistent, and who decides?

I mean, it's not as clear as "slowing down", which is basically what it is.

“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.

Yes, but I think part of the problem is that it's a very US term, used in nascar and indycar. The rest of the sports/world use safety car.

Not really, the big three have reached diminishing returns in terms of performance, and exponentially costly training to achieve those meagre gains. Worried their lunch will be eaten they are trying to artificially retard the competition, after all the only barrier is hardware.

The meaning is not clear because they can't just come out and say they want to slow or stop Chinese model releases while continuing to race ahead themselves.

Judging by your username, is English your native language? I am Polish, too, and while very proficient, I cannot claim I am naturally accustomed to each and every phrase to the point I can claim something sounds clear or not to a native speaker.

I am a native speaker, and "pacing the frontier" is absolutely meaningless to me.

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's one interpretation. When referring not to other actions but to a word describing a location it becomes more ambiguous.

eg "pacing the frontier" could also mean they are impatiently or anxiously walking up and down the border.

This is a more normal English meaning in my opinion — you picture a sentry patrolling a border.

That’s what I thought the original blog post was going to be about, pacing back and forth along the frontier. It’s a much more straightforward parse.

I like to imagine it means pacing around the frontier like a leopard looking for prey.

Y'all don't know about NASCAR and it shows

There is a "pace car" in Formula One too, although the name is informal, the official term is "safety car"...

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.

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 neuralese

'Pacing' in the intended meaning is not valley jargon, it's almost the opposite in that it comes from athletics/sports.

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 tech vocabulary.

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.

If they're trying to slow down AI progress why did they release a new model? What's the rush?

The tension between slowing down the overall race, while not losing 1st place.

Also note that this release isn't a model capability improvement, but a cost and efficiency (and style) improvement.

So they care more about being 1st place than slowing down the race.

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.

Are they? And how would you know if they were?

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.

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 called a safety car in most of the world and in the Himalayas, Chinese and Indian soldiers pace the frontier all day long.

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. So it's actually not well defined. 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.)

But a fast pace is a pace so it's potentially entirely contradictory to what they'd seem to mean

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.

It's actually so ambiguous that I'd sanction tabling the issue and revisiting biweekly.

Tabling as they do in the US, or tabling as they do in Britain?

Exactly

I don't think we can circle back to this until we have realigned our strategic synergies.

we need to realign our goals I'm order to deliver mission-driven impact

It's the opposite: pacing here means "slow down" while trying to avoid the negative affect.

Yeah, you are right! It just was not immediately obvious to me at first because of the "frontier" part.

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).

Thank you!

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

"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." (Occasionally English speakers will make other constructs like "pace the work" (meaning "spread out a large workload over the allotted time instead of rushing through it") that are transitive but these can be understood as variations on "pace yourself" and are somewhat rarer.)

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.

to pace = to regulate

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

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.

Doesn't it mean "restrict competitors"?

Not at all. How do you come to that interpretation? It means restricting all competitors.

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.

> when I first saw it referenced I assumed it was

No need to assume, the phrase is literally a link to the blog post the defines it!

If you need to read the linked blog to understand the short phrase then it was poorly chosen and confusing which is what is being discussed.

It’s common terminology among runners and all kinds of racing.

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]"

In running and racing "pacing" is a means of maximising performance over an entire race.

It's a strategy to achieve more, not less.

You’re eliding the how.

A pacer in a race runs at a steady, predetermined speed to help their runner run at a target pace.

> You’re eliding the how.

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.

Running or biking faster and finishing the race are, at times, orthogonal.

And anyway, the whole point of my original comment was "pacing" was a fine and natural term to use in this debate.

The good old sports-to-corposlop pipeline.

Did you ever pace yourself or know anyone who had?

> Nobody would use "pacing" in this way.

A world exists beyond your vocabulary, post it. Apparently, quite a big world.

I don’t know, seems like it’s smaller to me if they’re going to limit themselves like that? I guess today is semantics day, lol

Have you ever heard someone say “pace yourself” when you are eating too fast or otherwise rushing too much?

That's a different phrase. "Pace yourself" is reflexive; "pacing the frontier" has the frontier as an object, but in that sense it only means to set the speed, nothing to do with slowing down.

Yes, the word simply means to set the speed.

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.

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'.

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).

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.

Think most people are aware of the phrase "pace yourself".

Pace is a very commonly used term in projects to describe a rate of progress.

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.

How do they not communicate clearly? A few weeks ago they stated that they would like to regulate the pace of frontier model development/releases, and they reminded us of that in this post.

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.

It gets hard to ignore the annoyance when the volume degrades the signal. At some point the people who wish to engage with the substance just nope out when they see a sea of banality, and that's all you're left with.

Either the complainers are whining about something that isn't there, you are failing to notice something that is there, or it's subjective. Only one out of those three options merits the confidence with which you're dismissing the people you disagree with.

But those people believe that sloppy wording is itself a strong signal that the speaker/writer is the one lacking in substance, and doesn't deserve the attention or trust of the listener.

That's not what my comment is about. The parent said you're free to ignore the complaints, and I pointed out that when the volume is high, that's hard to do.

We all know that clanker language is often ridiculously bad. Got it.

Maybe policing every word and sentence and lodging your complaint along with all the other similar complaints is the right move. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. But meanwhile we're degrading the overall discourse on the topic at hand.

I'm not saying which is right, I'm saying there's a cost to constantly expressing one's annoyance on a well-worn subject. If you click a thread about X to read complaints about Y, we're doing great I guess.

The discourse is degrading rapidly on multiple fronts, don't ignore one in favor of the other.

> It gets hard to ignore the annoyance when the volume degrades the signal.

LLMs in a nutshell

True :) I recognize I had a soapbox moment, but yeah, it's complicated

Maybe it's clear to native speakers, but both "pacing" and "frontier" have multiple meanings. "Pace" as a verb means literally just walking, as a noun it's the speed at which something progresses. So I'm not sure that everyone reading this phrase will immediately realize that "pace" actually means slowing down the pace of development (having "slow" in the phrase would have probably sounded too negative). Also, it's not immediately intuitive that "frontier" refers to frontier AI models.

Actually, when I first read "pacing the frontier", the first thing that came to my mind was a border guard patrolling a border by foot...

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.

Some people believe they’re talking about potentially world-ending situations.

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

You're really verbing the noun on the discourse here, belt and suspenders-style

what?

What are you Dario's language police?

What are you, Sam Altman's counter-language police? :)

Seriously though, I can't believe people care this much about a stupid phrase - either for or against.

I am a native English speaker and interpreted it the opposite way. "Pacing" a race doesn't mean slowing it down, it means setting the pace, the person in the lead sets the pace of the race.

So my natural understanding of "pacing the frontier" is that they believe they are in the lead and are setting the pace of AI development. It does not imply they are slowing things down at all, it implies they intend to stay in the lead.

> 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.

“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.

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.

They mean “slowing” the frontier. They should say slowing.

Slowing is a concrete and clear term and so they would be called out as liars immediately, it's also embarrassing for a business. Pace(ing) is vague and unclear non-word, so they can't be called out on something which can't be defined and also, because it is primarily only used by runners, cyclists or other competitive sports, they are kind of signalling to the VCs that they don't actually slowing, they are in a competitive race instead (wink, wink).

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/12dpnlk/compiling_upd... Xkcd 303 updated for today.

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.

I think you're defending the wrong thing here. Claude isn't a English lit major writing a treatise on post-modernist allegories. In this context, it's primarily being used to churn out source code files, which are literal instructions for a computer to follow.

People aren't objecting to the use of obscure phrases, or flowery English phrases in itself. The issue is where Claude uses it out of place, or in the wrong context, or just plain overuses it.

It would be the equivalent of a young child learning the phrase "Venn diagram" - then using that identical phrase in every single subsequent interaction with others. Cute at first...but very grating after the n-th time.

You used the phrase "baby with the bath water. What if you started using that same phrase in every single HN post you made after this? People would notice very soon.

That's how it is with "load-bearing", or "plainly".

The other issue is where Claude takes a metaphor, and try to contort it to fit all sorts of absurd situations. What if I said "baby with the bath water" could also be used in place of "load-bearing". So every time you imagine Claude saying "load bearing", replace it with "baby with the bath water".

"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".

It’s what old cowboys do when they get Alzheimer’s.

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".

> To me it clearly means "releasing frontier models at any pace less than as fast as possible".

It also seems to misimply that the "frontier" that they release is the same as the frontier behind closed doors. Who's to say they are not throttling full speed towards RSI privately while pacing their public releases?

It's not clear at all. I have no idea at a glance what concept it's even intended to convey, because "pacing" means multiple things and putting it next to an abstract concept of "the frontier" turns that into a whole matrix of possible meanings.

Hilarious you think that Internet forums are policeable in any meaningful way beyond avoiding outright lewdness and rage

> 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???

I may be nitpicking, but I think that “use the full force and violence of the United States to protect anthropic’s shareholder value” would be a more precise expression.

I don't disagree with you, but I have to remind you

sir, this is a hacker news thread

> 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.

nothing about that phrase is clear. frontier is as unclear as it gets by itself.

the lead that anthropic and openai had is diminishing faster than they'd like. this is them trying to be the luxury brand of ai.

The "frontier" is made up concept. Its for downstream companies to justify higher token prices. Very little to show for actual improvements.

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"?

pacing is a term used in long-distance running that means saving some energy for later so as not too burn out too quick. it's a strategy used to win the race, nothing more.

It means everybody else should slow down to let them get ahead.

holding internet forums to a standard of productivity is, ironically, one of the least productive exercises i've ever heard of

Meaning is clear? Sure ok. 1984.

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.

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!

ai is the final act of postmodernity, the total transition to a fugue state of mind. that is, the replacement of the human mind with an artificial hallucination.

hypercapitalism, hypermodernity, and finally, hyperreality.

Well now you’ve started people criticizing people for criticizing people criticizing language and how the fuck is that productive?

Word choice is a big part of the substance, and an even bigger part of clarity.

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."

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.

I read it like they were the only ones who could protect us from the leopards so they pace at the edge of the fire all night, selflessly keeping us safe. While pocketing a sweet wedge of VC cash.

Maybe that was a different essay?

good use of AI to generate this.

You are getting sleepy.

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...

USMIL is slop-driven these days. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49806430

You're right to call that out

IDK I think Anthropic is plenty smarmy and weird itself. Sounds like they wrote it.

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.

Waylon and the Duke boys were “straightenin’ the curves” and “flattenin’ the hills.”

You were close, though. :)

It's the intent that matters. If you've got the curves, I've got the time.

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.

Hey, when i was in my twenties i told every girl that i was "pacing the frontier"... The right pace makes the denouement just that much sweeter.

Smarmy and weird was probably just the vibe i was giving off. Incidentally, I've always found Claude easier to talk to than most people lol

"While I was pacing the frontier, I discovered some load-bearing fence posts that I should have surfaced earlier."

> “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.

I would personally choose "Pacing the peloton", as a reference to bike racing.

"Pacing the frontier" sounds more like everyone announcing "we've hit a plateau"

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.

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".

"Pace yourself" doesn't specifically mean "slow down", it actually means to maximize your speed across the full race. In other words it can mean speeding up when you look at the average pace across the entire event.

Yes, and pacing also stops you running too fast at the beginning of the race and blowing up. I believe "we can finish the overall race faster" is part of the metaphor they were aiming for.

Nah, they just want their competitors to slow down.

It does, but "pace yourself" is something we say to kids (for example) to tell them to slow down because they're going too fast. We don't tell people to pace themselves because they're going too slow.

“… since we called for a slowdown in AI research”

But stating it plainly like this would make the contradiction too obvious.

is the frontier load bearing?

What's the blast radius we can expect when these changes land?

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com