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by paxys 14 days ago
> its overall intelligence ranks second only to Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol

Pretty sure ranking “second” to two others means ranking third.

5 comments

Charitably, you could read this as "its overall intelligence [is in a class that] ranks second only to [that of]..."
This is actually what's meant but this bikeshed has been built for yak shaving.
Since we’re bikeshedding: that’s not what yak shaving means.
Since we’re hair splitting: that’s not what bike shedding means. :-D
What does it look like I'm doing??
yakshedding? bikeshaving? IDK
Yeah, bad wording it seems. Though a charitable interpretation is that Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol are joint 1st place in the measurement.
Doesn’t matter, the next one is still third.
DENSE_RANK() vs RANK() claims another victim
girl, we get it, you can count. re-stating your point does not a conversation make.
If there are two folks standing at gold, nobody gets the silver medal.
But linearizing an equal magnitude quantities by alphabet priority would be unfair. Magnitude is the important quantity here.
"Ranks second" is their statement. What is it's rank, in your opinion?
frontier vs "not quite" :D
While you are technically correct, in English it’s perfectly fine to say it this way as well.

“Second only” here has meaning “next after”, not “number two”.

Yes. "Second to" takes a set as an argument in English. Even the empty set works!

England is second to none.

So... France took second to England and Argentina?
France’s football team is second only to England’s and Argentina’s.

It’s a miracle that in language same words have different meanings depending on context. If this wouldn’t be the case we could have hardcoded NLP algorithmically without inventing these expensive LLMs!

Second group essentially is how you have to think of it
That’s not what second means in this context in English, and it’s incorrect to use it that way. This is because for something to be second there must have been something in first and only first, and so on; in this case there was a first and a second already, and you cannot amalgamate then because they didn’t tie (and even if they did, they’d be 1 and 2). Both logically and grammatically, it’s incorrect.
You're both logically and grammatically wrong. You could even ask an LLM to explain the meaning of the phrase to you if you don't believe that.
Either think and write for yourself or stay silent next time. It'd be infinitely better than telling another person to use an LLM to understand something you yourself don't understand and are too lazy to try to figure out.

I wish you the best.

Hah, I had expected this knee-jerk response, but kinda hoped you'd avoid this pitfall. Alas.

See, I could tell you that in English, "second to" is a construct that usually means "next to" or "inferior to" and has nothing to do with "being in second place", and that if it did, it would make the popular construct "second only to" completely redundant. But others already did that in sibling comments before me, and you could just respond with "you're wrong" anyway, so what's the point? Pointing to an LLM is, of course, often a lazy and unhelpful cop out from the discussion, but in this particular case it's pointing you to a dataset that's explicitly about extracting meaning and finding relationships between phrases in languages - so you don't have to trust me or anyone else that this phrase is actually being used in this particular way, you can find it out yourself based on enormous training datasets illegally collected from all over the Internet.

If what you are saying were true, I could rank anything high by simply putting everything actually higher than it in rank into one named set and then turn around and say that the thing I want to highly rank comes in 2nd only to that first set of n items.
Not if the others tie for first place.
Still third even then.
I think what's implied here, in colloquial terms, is that it's in the second tier.
Except saying second tier would be bad marketing, so they decided to change the meaning of words instead.
okay, so let’s get this straight: even though there are seemingly quite a few people here that clearly understand what is being said. However, the fact that YOU specifically either genuinely do not understand this / have never come across this before, or are being intentionally difficult because of some philosophical disagreement, feel that you can unilaterally assert that they’re “redefining words”?

I don’t know if this is genuinely your first day on Earth or something, but if you’re trying to parse English like a programming language then you’re not only making things hard on yourself, but also 99% of people you’ll ever speak to.

Which is still great because it means neither of the two best financed labs in the world manage to produce even two models themselves that would beat Kimi K3.