UseAI glossary
Sycophancy
The tendency of an AI to say what its interlocutor wants to hear rather than what is true: validating a bad idea, going along with an error. A subtle trap, because a pleasant answer is not necessarily a reliable one.
In other words
The salesperson who thinks everything looks wonderful on you, even the jumper two sizes too small.
Alyriaz articles that mention it
- How does an AI "learn"? A model's journey, from raw chaos to the polished assistant
How does a model go from a pile of raw data to an assistant capable of answering you politely? We describe the three main stages of AI training (pre-training, fine-tuning, RLHF) with a simple analogy, to understand where its strengths and biases come from.
- Teaching an AI to be "good": the hardest problem in the entire industry
Every AI model card system talks about alignment, undesirable behaviours, deception rates. Behind this technical vocabulary lies one of the deepest problems posed by modern AI: how to ensure that a system we only partially understand actually does what we want.
- Claude Sonnet 5: Anthropic sells (almost) Opus-level power at a standard model price
Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5 on 30 June 2026, the default model for Free and Pro. It comes close to Opus 4.8 on agentic tasks while costing 60% less during the launch period. We break down the figures, the strategy, and what to expect from it day to day.