Nathan Lambert is an AI researcher and writer who comments on open models and reinforcement learning on X. Recent posts cover Kimi K3.1 Pro's showing on the Artificial Analysis index, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and its open-sourced DeepInfer inference framework, Meta's Muse Spark Open and the Muse Open License, plus leaked RL details from closed labs and how models perform outside coding.
Congrats to Reflection folks -- it's hard to get the first model out, and we hope you can rapidly accelerate contributions to the ecosystem from here :) [Quoting @reflection_ai]: Introducing Beam: a highly efficient agentic open model with 501B total paramete…
I think pacing the frontier is good as an idea in principle but dead on arrival as something you can actually do. What will we, decide which benchmarks we can improve on? Who is involved? If we stop pushing "capabilities" we'll do a ton of research on swarms…
It's a huge failure of the AI ecosystem that a whole bunch of people respond to something like this with "you're evil" and "shame on you." We'll work to shifting the norms here. There are positive paths forward, even if things will be hard. [Quoting @natolamb…
Love to see Google surprising people with Gemini 4. More labs at the frontier is wonderful for consumers (competition) and the world (reduction in concentration of power). Excited to see how it goes in real-world scenarios.
Hard to make a Bretton Woods analogy with only 1 country represented. [Quoting @DavidSacks]: The Bretton Woods of Super Intelligence
Current harnesses have a very rigid setup in how the LLM can manage its own context. We show that you can let LLMs edit the context directly - enabling better long-horizon memory, FLOP efficient adaption, & more. Don't fear compaction anymore! [Quoting @R…
Sigh. I wrote this post below, but then I didn't post it because I am tired of the consistent pushback I get from folks with the same safety worldview as Anthropic. I guess that means I should send it. Here goes! This post is pretty solipsistic and doesn't pr…
Woah, huge bullish signal for open models that OpenAI feels a pressure to serve users with these models. It's not a world where OpenAI alone can build all the models it's customers need! [Quoting @baseten]: Baseten joined the @OpenAI B2B marketplace today as…
The problem for folks like this isn't that they're dumb or anything, Timnit has all the skills of top scientists, rather the information ecosystem and peer groups they live in that don't encourage interrogating thought. Echo chambers are a slow death of clear…
Remember when OpenAI delayed GPT OSS after Kimi K2 released for "safety" (I've had it confirmed to be for kimi multiple times). I feel like this is fine, landing a model is very much about competitive positioning on price, scores, etc. Especially when release…
Remember when Dean Ball was roasted for saying open models were deflationary/decel, and no one bats an eye at this. [Quoting @zerohedge]: This could be a problem: Goldman sensitivity table shows that in a worst case scenario where hyperscaler ROIC on capex is…
We're in a phase where companies whose work-culture is suited to how frontier models interact with employees out of the box will receive a massive acceleration relative to their competitors. Same goes for how flexible employees are in using them. [Quoting @si…
Hire DHH to give every undergrad cs graduation speech for a few years. This is the mindset that is needed to enjoy and thrive in what comes next with building software. [Quoting @scottstts]: My god this is such a good speech that every SWE needs to hear. You…
Too many people assume that as RSI kicks in, open weight models don't matter. In practice, RSI won't be a binary and the open-source stack becomes how many capabilities are rapidly diffused globally. If you don't control the substrate of diffusion (open model…
Frontier: pacing Pulling up the ladder: accelerating [Quoting @M1Astra]: Claude Opus 5.5 will be the first Opus meant to fall back to a less capable model for "a small set of capabilities related to the development of frontier LLMs, such as kernel development…
Whenever I see a model top this chart, it's normally a bit of a red flag. Would love to be proven wrong! [Quoting @synthwavedd]: As expected, unfortunately the only bad thing about the new Opus is it's a token-gobbling monster. Uses the most tokens per Intell…
Strong agree. There’s way less of this than I would expect — partially due to the fact that making a high quality environment usually involves fairly expensive verification (testing strong models). Still, there can be much more. [Quoting @Thom_Wolf]: releasin…
Real open model nerds knew Xiaomi is cooking with MiMo! An open RL dashboard for the top scoring open model is aura. [Quoting @_TobiasLee]: MiMo V2.6 is shipping
I don’t agree exactly on the assumption that full RSI will work, but this is an excellent video summarizing where we are at.
My best guess is that for scaled RL most of the top Chinese AI labs are starting to use a lot of Huawei for inference and Nvidia for training (maybe not for weird architectures). As agent swarms, even more scaled post-training, etc becomes the norm, this will…
Seems like one of the most important research problems for CS academics is llm-supervised peer review. If we don’t solve it the academic institutions are toast. It seems easier than building new institutions.
One of the coolest at-scale RL resources made public yet! You love to see it. [Quoting @_LuoFuli]: Nearly half a year of silence. We spent it studying one problem: how far RL can scale. MiMo-V2.6 is in the middle of its RL run right now. Three things we scale…
Open-source AI reading list posted on Hacker NewsA public-facing reading list on open models was posted on Hacker News, compiling key writings on why models are released, gradients of openness, business strategy, and risks, aimed at getting readers up to speed.
I would consider helping as an independent evaluator along with the non profit I’m building. Is going to be a crucial role and there aren’t many independent people with substantial technical expertise. I think I represent an important moderate camp on AI capa…
A great read. I have similar feelings about how AI labs approach progress directly and without nurturing of scientific communities & intuition. The math research community went through the transition the fastest, so it was felt most. Other fields next.
Big W for people saying that distillation was mostly an SFT artifact, and how its unclear how it would become increasingly influential in an era defined by RL. [Quoting @xeophon]: great that there is now more insights and transparency into where distillation…
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