As a fervent Claude Code user who made the switch to GPT 5.6 Sol over Opus 5 over hard-to-read prose this makes me happy. I love your product but the current models are very hard to work with if you need to do a lot of context switching. Brevity is key.
Brevity means less output tokens, which doesn’t really align with the AI vendors incentives (unless there is a causal relationship with people switching, of course).
Though Claude 5 is not too verbose, it’s more like, full of incomprehensible jargon (even when you’re expert in the domain discussed!)
> Brevity means less output tokens, which doesn’t really align with the AI vendors incentives
Actually, I think Jeavon's Paradox [1] means the opposite. If doing X is $100, you may only use it to do X, but not Y, Z, or W. If doing X is $33, maybe you'll use it for X, Y, Z, and W -- spending 1/3 more than you otherwise would.
Or perhaps not you personally, but maybe you'd be willing to spend $100, but three of your friends find it too expensive. If it's only $33 to accomplish some task, then maybe all four are now spending $33.
It’s messier for LLMs because you cannot easily compare the cost between runs, outside of benchmarks. Evaluating the value of the output is already extremely hard. But then you add the fact that you don’t know the cost of the output before it is generated. And Anthropic doesn’t share their tokenizers. It’s not as simple as your examples to get a signal that tells you to spend more or less
Which is something the providers that are trying to watermark their texts can't afford. Superfluous replies give much more opportunity to further encode this junk information.
You're assuming they're training the model to maximize the watermark signal, on top of already adding the watermark. I suspect that would hurt model performance quite a lot, and simply be unnecessary... the watermark tech works well enough as it is.
As far as I know, anthropic aren't intrinsically motivated by watermarking (if anything it hurts sales, and seems indifferent to safety(?)) they're simply doing it to fulfill the EU obligations.
> As far as I know, anthropic aren't intrinsically motivated by watermarking (if anything it hurts sales, and seems indifferent to safety(?)) they're simply doing it to fulfill the EU obligations.
They are. They want to reduce the amount of LLM generated text they feed into their next model training.
Also, how would you watermark a sentence with just 3 words for an example? This exactly why it became so verbose.
That would be a terrible tradeoff. The ship has already sailed and a lot of public AI content will not be their own. Deliberately making their product worse to reduce identifiability of AI inputs by 25% just doesn't sound worth it to me. Is that what you would pick if you were in charge of anthropic and wanted to maximise the company's product?
And what wisdom do you think they would be missing if unable to distinguish three word written pieces? Keep in mind that most sources are not inherently trustworthy just because they rate as human written, too. You need some other way to rate text in all cases.
Perhaps, but there are certainly now catchphrases and words that can indicate it was written with AI i.e. load-bearing, idempotent, etc. Style and structure are in and of themselves, a fingerprint.
Also a codex user but for me brevity is not it's strong suit. I basically have to give it bigger tasks than I am used to to warrant the time it takes to complete. I feel whatever context the tooling adds can also be problematic
It's not really brevity - it's the constant writing tropes. It's like they ready a book on advertising copy and that's the only way they can write. Very tedious. Is Sol much better? I might have to switch to that too!
Lets see what they do with Opus first. I didn't find Fable 5.0 prose that bad to read, but improvement is always welcome. It's Opus 5.0 that's atrocious.
