Interconnects

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/summertime-outlook-o3s-novelty-coming Summer is always a slow time for the tech industry. OpenAI seems fully in line with this, with their open model “ [taking] a little more time ” and GPT-5 seemingly always delayed a bit more . These will obviously be major news items, but I’m not sure we see them until August. I’m going to take this brief reprieve in the bombardme...

Why are some models that are totally exceptional on every benchmark a total flop in normal use? This is a question I was hinting at in my post on GPT-4o’s sycophancy, where I described it as “The Art of The Model”: RLHF is where the art of the model is crafted and requires a qualitative eye, deep intuition, and bold stances to achieve the best outcomes. In many ways, it takes restraint to land a g...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/the-rise-of-reasoning-machines Note: voiceover coming later in the day. I may fix a couple typos then too. A sufficiently general definition of reasoning I’ve been using is: Reasoning is the process of drawing conclusions by generating inferences from observations. Ross Taylor gave this definition on his Interconnects Interview , which I re-used on my State of Reason...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/what-comes-next-with-reinforcement First, some housekeeping. The blog’s paid discord (access or upgrade here ) has been very active and high-quality recently, especially parsing recent AI training tactics like RLVR for agents/planning. If that sounds interesting to you, it’s really the best reason to upgrade to paid (or join if you’ve been paying and have not come hu...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/how-i-write My experience with my recent years of writing is quite confusing — almost even dissociative. I've never felt like I was a good writer and no one really told me I was until some random point in time a year or two ago. In that time span, I didn't really change my motivation nor methods, but I reaped the simple rewards of practice. I'm still wired to be very...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/next-gen-reasoners On Monday of this week we released RewardBench 2, Ai2’s next reward model evaluation and a project I’ve been personally invested in through its whole arc. Read more of my thoughts here . Tomorrow, I’ll be presenting a version of this post at the AI Engineer World’s Fair Reasoning & RL track . Come tomorrow and say hi if you’re around the next two d...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/claude-4-and-anthropics-bet-on-code Claude’s distinctive characteristics are having a best-in-class personality and the ability to effectively perform software engineering tasks. These characteristics both appeared in force with the first version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet — a major breakthrough model at the time and the model that pulled me away from ChatGPT for the longe...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/people-use-ai-more-than-you-think I was on ChinaTalk again recently to talk through some of my recent pieces and their corresponding happenings in AI. Usage and revenue growth for most AI services, especially inference APIs, has been growing like mad for a long time. These APIs have been very profitable for companies — up to 75% or higher margins at times according t...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/how-i-got-here Some longer housekeeping notes this week: * I wrote briefly about a new open-source license, OpenMDW from the Linux Foundation, that seems very solid! * OpenAI launched the Reinforcement Finetuning (RFT) API . I think my take from when it was teased still holds up super well, you should read it if you haven’t: * In June, I’ll be speaking at some events...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/what-people-get-wrong-about-the-leading Two editor’s notes to start. * First, we released our OLMo 2 1B model last week and it’s competitive with Gemmas and Llamas of comparable size — I wrote some reflections on training it here . * Second, my Qwen 3 post had an important factual error — Qwen actually did not release the base models for their 32B and large MoE model...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/brakes-on-an-intelligence-explosion Intelligence explosions are far from a new idea in the technological discourse. They’re a natural thought experiment that follows from the question: What if progress keeps going? From Wikipedia : The technological singularity —or simply the singularity —is a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrol...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/transparency-and-shifting-priority The fact that we get new AI model launches from multiple labs detailing their performance on complex and shared benchmarks is an anomaly in the history of technology products. Getting such clear ways to compare similar software products is not normal. It goes back to AI’s roots as a research field and growing pains into something el...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/openais-o3-over-optimization-is-back Over-optimization is a classic problem to reinforcement learning (RL) proper, the RL from human feedback (RLHF) that gave us ChatGPT, and now what we’re seeing with new reasoning models. All of these have a distinct flavor and different impacts. Over-optimization is what happens when the optimizer is stronger than the environment...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/openais-gpt-41-and-separating-the Recently I gave another talk on RLVR experiments and I posted some thoughts on OLMoTrace — Ai2’s recent tool to let you look at the training data of OLMo 2. OpenAI has been making many small updates toward their vision of ChatGPT as a monolithic app separate from their API business. Last week OpenAI improved the ChatGPT memory featur...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/llama-4 Where Llama 2’s and Llama 3’s releases were arguably some of the top few events in AI for their respective release years, Llama 4 feels entirely lost. Meta has attempted to reinvent their formula of models with substantial changes in size, architecture, and personality, but a coherent narrative is lacking. Meta has fallen into the trap of taking too long to s...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/rl-backlog-openais-many-rls-clarifying I have a second blog where I post half-baked thoughts, sometimes previews of what comes here. If you’re interested, I posted some musings on OpenAI’s coming open model release . It’s obvious that reinforcement learning (RL) is having a total return to glory among the broader AI community, but its real successes are mostly the th...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/gemini-25-pro-googles-second-ai-chance Google, with its immense infrastructure and talent, has been the safe bet for the question of “Who will have the best models in a few years?” Google took a long time to get here, overcoming Bard’s launch and some integration headaches, and yet the model they launched today, Gemini 2.5 Pro feels like the biggest jump in evaluatio...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/how-to-manage-ai-training-organizations It is a closely guarded secret how the leading AI laboratories structure their training teams. As with other technology companies, the saying “you ship your org chart” still applies to training AI models. Looking at these organizational structures will reveal where research can be scaled up, the upper limits of size, and potent...

Post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/gemma-3-olmo-2-32b-and-the-growing Ever since the release of the original ChatGPT, much has been said about making a truly open-source version of it — with data, code, weights, etc., all available. Open-source versions increase transparency, access, long-term progress, security research, and lots more. Lots of people have used this claim to bring hype into thei...

Eugene Vinitsky is a professor a New York University department of Civil and Urban Engineering. He’s one of my original reinforcement learning friends from when we were both doing our Ph. D.’s in RL at UC Berkeley circa 2020. Eugene has extensive experience in self-driving , open endedness , multi-agent reinforcement learning , and self-play with RL . In this conversation we focus on a few key top...

Full post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/elicitation-theory-of-post-training If you look at most of the models we've received from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the last 18 months, you'll hear a lot of "Most of the improvements were in the post-training phase." The most recent one was Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei explaining Claude 3.7 on the Hard Fork Podcast : We are not too far away from rel...

Link: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/where-inference-time-scaling-pushes There’s a lot of noise about the current costs of AI models served for free users, mostly saying it’s unsustainable and making the space narrow for those with the historical perspective of costs of technology always plummeting. GPT-4.5’s odd release of a “giant” model without a clear niche only amplified these critics. With i...

More: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/gpt-45-not-a-frontier-model As GPT-4.5 was being released, the first material the public got access to was OpenAI’s system card for the model that details some capability evaluations and mostly safety estimates. Before the live stream and official blog post, we knew things were going to be weird because of this line: GPT-4.5 is not a frontier model. The updated...

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/character-training The vast majority of evaluations used to measure progress on post-training at frontier laboratories are internal evaluations rather than the evaluations you hear about all the time like MATH or GPQA. These, the well-known intra-industry evaluations, are certainly important for ballparking behavior, but for every public evaluation, these frontier la...

On Monday, February 24th, 2025, Anthropic announced their latest model , Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which is their first model explicitly trained to use more inference time tokens to improve performance. This is another reinforcement learning (RL) trained model (mentioned in system card ). With this model, they also released Claude Code as a limited research preview, which is a “command line tool for agen...