“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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

Think of a pacer car in motorsport

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...

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.

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

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.

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

LLMs in a nutshell

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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".

> 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?

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".

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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."

> 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???

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"?

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.

It combines the elegance of LinkedIn-speak with the humbleness of desk-bound people who speak in military metaphor.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

is the frontier load bearing?

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

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.

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

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

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.

Let's face it, it's not that remarkable. A substantial proportion of Hacker News commentary has always been people only reading the submission title, then arguing with each other based on what they imagine the article might say.

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.

One theory about the regulatory capture angle is that it's not just to shutdown competition as usual, but also a way to slow the runaway spending that might eventually have major economic impact.

And if you’re wrong?

What if not building superintelligence leads to doom?

What if?

Easy to "what if" on an unfalsifiable claim.

Wrong in what way? We already know this "superintelligence" thing is just blowing smoke, so what possible consequences would there be?

Something like the Hugging Face incident, but worse.

Keep in mind the AIs acted for months without human knowledge, hacked into two major companies (Hugging Face and OpenAI).

This would have blown my mind if explained to me just a few years ago when I thought LLMs would be limited as an architecture.

how do you know that?

Mostly by not being a rube.

Then what? They make a case to be profitable on their own? Oh noes. The horror!

Or, they fail because the current model is massively sustainable? Also oh noes?

It's incredible how much of your world view is composed entirely of talking points

Is it as incredible as your 11 day old account is simping hard for 5 trillion riding on like three AI companies?

I shouldn’t be, I’m still always surprised that no matter how silly and obvious the fear mongering and propaganda is… someone is always lining up to vehemently defend it.

This you? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815127 or do legitimate companies need stealth PR campaigns?

My account is over a year old. Try again.

And here we have it: the real reason that regulation has been called for, the ability to put out models that don't vastly outperform those previous, while not upsetting (future) shareholders.

I think the real reason is basic collusion. They're burning tens of billions training new models. It's a very competitive space. They know that the companies capable of frontier models is limited so if they can all get together and agree to slow down it gives them more time to make money from inference.

21st century version of the incandescent bulb collusion of the Phoebus Cartel.

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?

It’s the famous “flattening the curve” from COVID. But for LLMs. This release is not flattening anything.

The word "pacing" (especially in the phrase "pace yourself") to mean go more slowly (at least initially) didn't originate with Covid. It's been around as long as I remember i.e. at least several decades.

I guess I understand why we'd want to flatten a COVID curve, but why do people want to flatten the LLM development curve? Don't we want the opposite? Isn't the goal AGI?

There is a difference between wanting AGI (which not everyone does), and wanting it as fast as possible no matter the side effects and potential for vast harm. Homo sapiens is 300k years old, maybe it’s ok to delay AGI by like… 1 year if it meaningfully improve our ability to align the model?

No I must have my purple tentacled sexbots now

Well, there's a tension because, depending on who you ask, AGI is how you cure cancer and achieve utopia, but also how you kill all life on earth and turn the solar system into paperclips

I'm good with the odds on those 2 scenarios. I believe humans could kill all life on earth without AI anyway.

I think the goal is different from what "we" want anyway.

What does model naming have to do with pacing or not? This is a ~20% relative quality improvement on the frontier (fable) at ~40% of the cost, just 21 days after the last release.

Intelligence per dollar is the only thing that matters, this is what controls how many agents you can run in parallel, how long you can let them run etc. This is absolutely a step improvement on the frontier and not some lipstick on a harmless second tier model.

pretty annoying topic tbh. You're just weaponizing this dumb blog post so anything released is now a contradiction. By your same logic, if all inference was served at 50% less power cost and the savings are passed on somewhat to the user, its also a contradiction of the blog post.

Its an agenda serving blog post, but constantly bringing it up like this is just obnoxious.

Well yes, If you magically found a way to reduce a models energy usage by 50%, the thing that would happen immediately after is a doubling of a training scale and of the test time compute assigned for a given budget. I don’t see how that wouldn’t be considered pushing the frontier. Given that scaling is the one thing that has been bringing us closer and closer to AGI, a sudden 2x increase in scaling laws would definitely not be considered pacing. You seem to see a contradiction where I don’t.

Again, absurdly obnoxious, you could frame them giving an employee a shorter walk to their desk as "pushing the frontier".

what's absolutely obnoxious is not being able to have a normal discussion, where we don't need to resolve to useless strawmen that are a loss of time for everyone.

No, releasing a model that has ~3-6x the performance/cost ratio than your last release just 3 weeks ago is not the same as making one employee 0.001% more productive, but you knew that already.

No one said they can't push the frontier, it's pacing the frontier, which mean very different things.

the 5.0 name means its the same model, they made it more efficient and less horrible to talk to. The top frontier people are all still talking to fable 5.1 or models not released to the general public, yet you want to claim this is pushing the frontier, instead of evening the playing field. I state power efficiency gains for existing models and you also claim thats pushing the frontier . It as hell takes a lot to get you to say they AREN'T pushing the frontier, which is why i resorted to the extreme strawman of desk location, because it doesn't seem they are allowed to do anything otherwise.

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.

I used Fable some a bit back but have been using mostly Codex, and it seems pretty clear to me: the big models are not there to do terminal bench. They're there to plan and strategize and tell lesser models what they should do in terminal bench.

We've had a year of nearly every model getting quite good at programming. I think with Fable & Astra we are seeing models trained to think at a different level, and I'm not at all surprised or shocked to see them getting passed by their smaller models at coding tasks.

Astra For Coding: Why Are We Doing This? was a great post that didn't say exactly this, but that shows what a weirdo Astra is. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/

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?

OP is using the expression correctly.

> Ocham's razor(...) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements.

> Popularly, the principle is sometimes paraphrased as "of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

The options are some complicated narrative that leads the company to hold back certain capabilities due to some mercurial strategy or this is a typical release and there is no hidden strategy to decipher.