One thing that jumped out at me is a slower-than-I'd-expect rate of adoption of Opus 5. If you're running Opus 4.8 and choosing not to migrate to 5, what's behind that decision?
Yes they do. They have to file an S-1 with the SEC, which will be made public about a month before the IPO.
The S-1 has to include, among other things, three years of audited financial statements, plus interim statements (unaudited). It will cover both revenue and expenses, the latter breaking out things like cost of revenue, R&D, sales and marketing etc.
Based on the (unofficial but reported) IPO target date of late Sep to early Oct, the S-1 will have to be made public in a few weeks from now.
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Have you ever heard of the Joined Together States? Or bosom peril? Kidney disappointment? Fake neural organizations? Lactose bigotry? These nonsensical, and sometimes amusing, word sequences are among thousands of “tortured phrases” that sleuths have found littered throughout reputable scientific journals.
They typically result from using paraphrasing tools to evade plagiarism-detection software when stealing someone else’s text. The phrases above are real examples of bungled synonyms for the United States, breast cancer, kidney failure, artificial neural networks, and lactose intolerance, respectively.
</quote>
During the whole BLM thing a few years ago my emplyer wanted "to do something" I guess so they added one of those "inclusive language" SaaS buttons.
This seems more plausible to me. "Bosom peril" is not in any way a synonym for cancer. But if you think 'cancer' as a word will trigger people then softening it with 'peril' makes sense.
It's not a woke sensitivity thing. They're using spinners, tools designed for spammers years ago (long predating LLMs) that just randomly substitute words from a thesaurus.
It works because so many academic journals are write-only media. The only things that actually "read" the papers are machines that check for plagiarism, compute citation counts and do other things used to decide on academic promotions. So it doesn't matter if the text is nonsensical.
And the tools work for spam, the original use case, because people who want to buy Viagra from spam mails don't care if they have to read weird English, they just want to find the web shops. Works great for bypassing keyword and Bayesian filters though.
Some papers show signs of being generated by context-free grammars or random phrase combination as well.
These papers are often being produced by "paper mills" that bulk generate fake studies and sell them to academics, who use them to get promoted without having to do any real research.
I wrote an article about the problem years ago if you want to learn more:
Your description of the completely apathetic chain of actors, starting with the journal editors, was depressing to read.
You did not explicitly comment on it, but the situation also implies that even researchers don't really care about research? Like no advisers, or employers or colleagues are reading through these papers?
It feels like more people should have noticed that these journals will print garbage and having an article in a journal like this would not be a positive signal anymore. Maybe it just takes a while?
Yeah, nobody is reading these journals. They all have dozens of "editors" but it's just CV manipulation.
People are noticing, that's why academic credibility is in free fall but it's all tied up with ideology. Academia purged everyone not on the far left a long time ago, so the left find it useful to promote universities as still having the highest rigour.
"Bosom peril" sounds like what someone in the 1800s would write in a spicy novel describing a character's experience being unable to breathe while being hugged by a well-endowed lady.
It still knows how to speak English. When I tell it to explain something in plain language, it generally does a very good job. The weird thing is that those instructions don't persist: it lapses back into Claude-speak pretty much every turn no matter how hard I try to instruct it not to.
(In my case "it"=Fable; I assume Opus is similar.)
The Fable guardrails have trained me to pretty much exclusively use Opus when using Claude Code (lately I'm focused on a lot of security and security-adjacent stuff, which Fable refuses to do).
The "let's make money by selling/renting out TPUs" faction has won and the "let's make money by training and selling a frontier model" faction has lost.
And it's arguably not crazy, at least if SemiAnalysis's estimates are to be believed:
* 20% of all TPU shipments from Q3 2026 through Q4 2027 are sold to SPVs serving Anthropic ($150B of contracted revenue); vs
* ~$12B ARR for Gemini.
> The "let's make money by selling/renting out TPUs" faction has won and the "let's make money by training and selling a frontier model" faction has lost.
It's a variation of opportunity cost. A company that has an opportunity to take $1 and make $1.50 on it can't justify an opportunity to spend $1 and make $1.25, even though a less profitable company may make a good living on that. When considering capital allocation, Google has to consider the opportunity cost of investing more into their highly lucrative ads business. Another company that has no access to such a lucrative business uses different opportunity cost when it comes to allocating capital. It can easily be the case that Google could end up justify being in the business of renting out shovels and end up chased out of the business of using the shovels to create AIs entirely because that turns out not to be where the money is. I'm not saying that's obviously inevitable; I'm saying it's a possible and reasonable outcome.
That's why even though the industry produces giants, these giants can never just eat everything. Even though it seems like they have all the money, it isn't practical for them to try to do everything and in fact limits get hit very quickly for anything other than the primary, lucrative business.
Apparently there is no snappy term for this in the business space, according to such AI searches as I have run.
Of course the three short paragraph description of a general principle posted to Hacker News to give a partial answer to someone's 8-word question is simplified. What's the alternative? HN's text box is too short to contain a 4-year business course.
With all due respect, did you read my comment beyond the first paragraph? It addresses both points, TPU economics/pivot to sales + internal shortages making it hard to train models, to the extent they can be addressed based on public sources.
There are other factors at play, but they're more recent/second-order.
What other potential uses are there? Uploading books without WiFi is the only one that comes to mind.
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