“Pacing the frontier” sounds smarmy and weird, like the phrase was generated by Claude itself

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.

"pacing the frontier" is code for downgrading your expectations of AGI.

They are advertising the regulations they want to enforce in the following sentence, which makes their intentions explicit (ie apply those things made to suit us to our competitors).

In any professional sport, anyone can lobby the rules committee for a rules change and hope for the best. Meanwhile if you can't get one, you play the game by the existing set of rules, and you play to win.

What an amazing excuse for lower than expected performance! Our models are slow because we're so ethical.

the only thing they are pacing is what models the permanent underclass are allowed to have in life.

that, they fully intend to 'pace'.

This makes perfect sense. There are no real improvements anymore (just benchmaxxing), and they explain it by "pacing the frontier".

This IS pacing. Nobody said pacing would mean slow.

Pacing is very explicitly about RSI and similar training methods that will accelerate progress beyond our ability to comprehend it.

I thought we were all aware that 'pacing the frontier' was a marketing slogan, and the actual intent here was to suspend antitrust laws.

The amount of money spent on PR is insane.

Seems like a bigger focus on efficiency (both cost and speed) and the "tone" of Claude vs benchmarkmaxxing

When they talk about pacing, they are referring to their dangerous competitors, particularly those evil open-sores and Chinese ones, not their lovely safe models because you can trust them to look after your interests.

What the big players are trying with the current calls to slow things down, is the standard capitalism practise of trying to engineer regulatory capture. TBH I'm surprised those calls are coming so soon - they must be really worried about running out of what little moat that they have.

"The improvements are underwhelming for a model that, according to previous claims, should have replaced all knowledge work twice by now, but you know, it's just because we're pacing the frontier."

Others must slow down, but not us.

a 1 minute mile pace

> we called for pacing the frontier.

Translation: our models are getting shittier each iteration and we ran out of ideas. Let's invent scary stories and hope investors will lap it up.

Idiotic.

If they were really about putting brakes on these, they would simply make these things non-agentic.

Simply make them something that derives a text response from its training data.

"We made the incredibly tough decision to slow down development. Then after 4 days of twiddling our thumbs ... we present Opus 5.5"

kinda disingenuous. They include a whole section on pacing later on

It's laughable at this point. It feels like they're drumming up all this fear about imminent AI threats to emphasize the need to slow down, when in reality, the model progress seems already to be slowing down and has shifted to compute allocation (i.e. "how much compute do you want to throw at this prompt?"). All while continuing to tout benchmark records with each new release.