Is it surprising? The bulk of their work is largely derived from existing works themselves, nothing original, everything probabilistically paraphrased and then post-trained by lowly-paid, ESL workers resulting in the really annoying, mic-droppy writing output. It will never be original, it will never be new, it will always only be derivative.
They have not made anything revolutionary, they have only ever made evolutionary derivatives of medium-to-high quality with no accreditation or financial support for the original authors (at least not without being forced into a class-action over it).
Hard disagree. Claude and other frontier models are clearly a huge accomplishment, are already changing the world, and continue to get better.
Despite the real innovation, the way Anthropic communicates their work often comes across as disingenuous.
"Our models wrote a new VCS" is very different from "Our models adapted existing VCS to our bespoke needs". Both are impressive, so why over inflate the claim?
LLMs existed long before Anthropic came to the scene. Tensor logic was not created by them, only implemented. An engineer does a lot of cool good things, sure - but it's the theory grounding it that's revolutionary and that was not private enterprise driven.
Yes it was! Transformers came out of a Google lab. In the 2020 Google I/O Sundar Pichai even demoed a transformer based chatbot smart enough to larp as a paper airplane.
These things are the work of many hands, mostly privately funded, and it's indisputable that Anthropic has advanced the field.
They have not made anything revolutionary, they have only ever made evolutionary derivatives of medium-to-high quality with no accreditation or financial support for the original authors (at least not without being forced into a class-action over it).