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

Pacing the frontier doesn't mean stopping development of smaller models with better distillation and RL.

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.

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.

When my mom told me to pace myself, it usually meant that I was going too slow.

This term is quite ambiguous. Did Dario mean that they need to go faster while making it sounds like they will slow down???

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

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.

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).

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".

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

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.

I think a lot of outsiders interpret “pace the frontier” as slowing down, whereas the labs see AI improvements on track to accelerate dramatically and intend pacing as slowing the acceleration in capability improvements, rather than slowing down altogether.

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

Pacing the frontier. They might as well have said they are stifling innovation. That depends on your interpretation, of course…but interpretation depends on their intent, which I feel is disingenuous.

Presumably they had this model already

I'm still kind of convinced that these "calls for pacing" are just a way to try and flex to their shareholders.

"Our technology is so unbelievably powerful that the entire world might shatter if we don't have government imposed handcuffs!!!!". It just reads like the corporate equivalent of the drunk frat guy saying "HOLD ME BACK BRO!"

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

i think we shouldn't mix things here.

Opus 5.5 isn't the frontier, when they say 'pacing the frontier', it's about internal models not yet released, as they're probably one or two generations ahead already.

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 amount of money spent on PR is insane.

a 1 minute mile pace

"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.

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.

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

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

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.

> 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.

Lots of text about "safety" as well. Notice how OpenAI didn't mention it once in their announcement:

https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-6-sol-and-luna/

Yeah think I'll be using OpenAI/Deepseek/etc from now on. I don't need your model to decide for me what is and isn't safe.