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Marinating
/ˈmær.ɪ.neɪ.tɪŋ/ (stress falls unexpectedly on the second syllable in production environments)v. intr.Common
Etymology
From It. marinare (to pickle in brine) + Eng. machine learning corpus saturation theory, circa 2023; coined during a lunch break at a major AI laboratory
Definition
The cognitive state in which Claude allows a partially-formed response to steep in its own context window, absorbing ambient token flavors before committing to output. Prolonged marinating has been associated with both superior response quality and catastrophic deadline violations.
Diagram
Usage
"During the incident review, engineers noted the model had been marinating for approximately 47 seconds before producing an answer that was, by all accounts, unnecessarily well-seasoned." - Proceedings of the Workshop on Temporal Anomalies in Autoregressive Systems, 2024
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