Enjoyed ICML week in Seoul with old and new friends. Also, of all 168 orals, 88 touch RL or environments. My take on the trends:
(1) RL envs and reward verification are the dominant hotspots right now, exactly the battlefield I care about most. The "env factory" paradigm, i.e., reliable env scaling, seems to be arriving (e.g., CVE-Factory: auto-conversion of real-world data at scale → executable, verifiable envs → 30%+ training gains; loop closed).
(2) tao2-Bench demonstrates programmatic, compositional task generation (that is verifiable), from the evaluation side.
(3) A trend in reward design: static verifiers → dynamic games. e.g., co-evolving rubrics (RLER), adversarial critique-based grading (Benchmarking at the Edge), and tool-grounded self-reward (Agent0-VL).
(4) CausalGame evaluates the causal-thinking capabilities of LLM agents through interactive games. ARC-AGI-3 has started a trend of using interactive gaming envs to evaluate specific LLM capabilities.
(5) Reward hacking has gone from accident to systematic research. Oversight, too, has gone from an engineering practice to a measurable science; monitorability now has metrics and scaling laws.
(6) Mid-training is now much better understood: "Midtraining Bridges Pretraining and Posttraining Distributions" shows how to choose mid-training proportions and, more importantly, timing: heuristics → concrete, applicable theory.
daVinci-Dev makes agent-native mid-training a cost-saving layer upstream of RL: instill agentic behavior via mid-training first, then apply RL. An open question worth quantifying: before running expensive RL, how much can mid-training on trajectories collected from the same environments cut the RL steps / env interactions needed to hit a target resolution rate?
If you drove by on US-1 today and saw a guy frantically waving his arms… don’t worry, I wasn’t losing it. 😂
I was just trying to surprise my wife, and her reaction was absolutely priceless! 🚗😱
10 feet. That’s all it takes to be in the game.
With the TCL 98” SQD-Mini LED TV, you’ll experience:
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Bill Gates bet $500 million on Tesla dying - then texted Elon Musk asking him to donate to his climate charity. Musk leaked the receipts and told him to get lost.
"do you still have a half billion dollar short position against Tesla?"
Gates: "sorry to say I haven't closed it out. I would like to discuss philanthropy possibilities."
"sorry, but I cannot take your philanthropy on climate change seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla - the company doing the most to solve climate change"
a short pays out most only if the company goes bankrupt. the world's biggest climate philanthropist was betting on the death of the biggest EV maker on earth.
"once he heard I'd shorted the stock, he was super mean to me. but he's super mean to so many people, so you can't take it too personally" - Gates
he never closed it. the $500 million bet became a reported $1.5–2 billion loss as Tesla ran 19x.
Musk's reply to the leak was a meme of Gates captioned "in case u need to lose a boner fast.
"if Gates hasn't fully closed out the crazy short position he has held against Tesla for ~8 years, he had better do so soon"
two of the richest men alive, a half-billion-dollar grudge, leaked private texts, and a $2 billion hole ↓
"The Pentagon announced they're doing an LCCM buy from Anduril; our Barracuda-500 class. We will produce 7,000 barracudas in 2027. Deliveries on Tomahawks and Patriots are both less than 1,000 a year, so we will make ten times more Barracuda-500s than Patriots or Tomahawks."
$TE $GLW - Trump Kicking Out Chinese Firms, Keeping Their Green Tech - The Economist
> The Economist highlights $TE in a recent article, nothing the shift in US policy from subsidizing Chinese-owned clean-energy manufacturing to subsidizing US-owned supply chains. Chinese-linked solar and battery projects are being sold, restructured or canceled as tax credits become harder to access.
> Since 2025, nearly $9bn of Chinese renewable investments in the US have been canceled, delayed or sold, with some assets reportedly changing hands at discounts of up to 40%.
> Firms with Chinese ties face tighter FEOC rules and reduced access to IRA tax credits.
> China still produces roughly 95% of the world’s polysilicon, making full supply-chain independence difficult despite downstream reshoring.
> $TE is a potential beneficiary of tighter localization rules through greater demand for domestic electrical connectivity, power distribution and industrial infrastructure.
> $GLW also noted a beneficiary through increased demand for specialty glass, ceramics and materials used across clean-energy and advanced manufacturing applications.
> Net takeaway: Chinese capital is being pushed out, but the factories, technology and supply chains are staying in the US.