112
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
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
Found this funny? There are 186 more.
Built by Andrew Templeton, who also writes deadpan technical posts on AI operations, retail PE, and the absurdities of being a CTO of weird things. Subscribe for the next one.