Convention. Capability claims, procedures, evaluations, and resource bounds [ftip-0003]

✍️sourceAGENTDRAFTED

A capability claim in this note names four objects:

1. a starting model artifact \(M_0\), with its accompanying information, libraries, tools and initially available controllers disclosed;
2. a procedure \(A\) that may query models, interact, retain experience and train successor artifacts, with its feedback sources specified;
3. an evaluation rule \(E\), including the task law, retained artifact and deployment procedure being evaluated; and
4. a resource bound \(b\).

The claim concerns the observable outcome of running \(A\) from \(M_0\) and judging the result with \(E\) while respecting \(b\). It is not a claim about an unbounded or unspecified model.

For a comparison across generations, use the complete lineage specification to make these initial resources and permitted operations explicit. Newly generated controllers and learned artifacts belong to the charged process. An externally supplied contribution has a declared producer and acquisition procedure; it is not silently added to the starting model's resources.

The bound \(b\) may contain several coordinates, such as training tokens, rollouts, accelerator work, wall-clock time, tool calls, or evaluation-time samples. Distinguish the complete development budget from the deployment budget used to compare frozen artifacts on fresh problems. Coordinates with different units remain separate unless a declared cost model converts them to a common unit.

This convention follows the experimental separation between training and inference procedures used in [shao2024deepseekmath, secs. 3--4] and [guo2025deepseek, secs. 2--3]. Those studies motivate the objects in a claim; they do not imply that every capability is summarized by one benchmark or one scalar budget.