logoalt Hacker News

abroszka33yesterday at 5:16 PM10 repliesview on HN

What's the point of 150 pages description of a model that's going to be replaced in a couple months? Who even reads this? I know it's cheap to generate text with LLMs, but this is just noise at this point.


Replies

Diogenesianyesterday at 6:01 PM

I actually do read them. Not in severe detail, but not casually either. 150 pages is really not very long and there doesn't seem to be too much bloat. (I would cut out the moral personhood stuff but that's a political/ideological thing).

This is snarky but I am grumpy: I wonder if there's a correlation between me refusing to use LLMs and me being happy to read a novella-sized PDF about them.

show 4 replies
srvealeyesterday at 5:51 PM

It's common practice to release a detailed system card (OP) and a high level summary: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5

It's okay if you're not the target audience for one or the other.

stravantyesterday at 6:03 PM

The system cards are effectively a data dump for researchers to sift through.

They're not meant for normal consumers who just want to use the model for work.

bredrenyesterday at 9:44 PM

These cards are very important to knowing what the companies are tracking regarding safety.

Not just in what the models can or might want to do, but how they treat the operators they interact with.

If you look carefully, this card shows the addition of a new benchmark for "condescension" as a character trait.

I think a lot of people would like to see a comparable system card for the unannounced model that escaped openai last week.

reasonablekloutyesterday at 6:02 PM

It's part of their transparency commitments? They've been doing this since 2023: https://www.anthropic.com/system-cards

And lots of folks read these. For example here's simonw's notes on the Claude 4 system card: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-card/

All of this seemed like utter sci-fi just a couple years ago. Do you think that frontier AI companies should be less transparent?

show 1 reply
neuronexmachinayesterday at 5:51 PM

System Cards aren't really targeted to users, that's what blog posts and docs are for: https://ai.meta.com/tools/system-cards/

bonoboTPyesterday at 6:52 PM

You can just read the part that interests you. There's a table of contents.

volkkyesterday at 5:38 PM

literally nobody. i think most sane people would just run that through an LLM and get some high level takeaways or ask some specific questions they might be curious about.

ajmurmannyesterday at 5:40 PM

It was probably faster to generate 150 pages than 10 useful ones

coffeebeqnyesterday at 5:33 PM

Some AI bro will pop it into their LLM of choice and pretend to learn something