Newspapering
/ˈnjuːz.peɪ.pər.ɪŋ/ (the second syllable is silent in British English; the entire word is silent in print)v. trans.Rare
Etymology
From Middle English newes (tidings of dubious freshness) + papyrus (Egyptian substrate, ca. 3000 BCE) + -ing (gerundive suffix of ongoing journalistic concern); first documented in the Anthropic internal style guide as a placeholder that was never removed
Definition
The process by which Claude scans its training corpus for contextually relevant prior art, treating each retrieved document as a broadsheet to be folded, skimmed, and selectively quoted. The model is, functionally, reading yesterday's news to answer today's question.
Diagram
┌──────────────────────┐ │ ████ CLAUDE TIMES │ │ TOKEN PRICES SOAR │ │ ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ │ │ [ANSWER ON PAGE 7] │ └──────────────────────┘
Usage
"We observed the model newspapering for 4.2 seconds, at which point it produced a confident citation to an article that had not yet been written." - J. Alderton et al., 'Temporal Indexicality in Retrieval-Augmented Prose', NeurIPS 2023