Brian Burns

On sabbatical. Former early team @harvey

[will depue @willdepue]

announcement: i'm launching a $100,000 grant for amateur astronomy research: https://t.co/QQIpI7ink8

over the past few weeks, @joshuawolk @LukeFarritor and i have been digging through public telescope data, hunting for new planets, asteroids, and more

our first release: we found a new dwarf planet in our solar system!! it's insane how much you can find with some claude + codex credits

it's about 1/4 the width of Pluto and orbits about twice as far (way past Neptune), and looks like it's about the 50th largest object in our solar system. @joshuawolk is in the process of confirming it

this dwarf planet has sat in public images for over a decade without anyone noticing. there's tons more out there: all sitting in public NASA/ESA/etc. databases for you to analyze

there's tons of stuff still out there, sitting in data that astronomers don't have enough time to go through all of

you can do this too! apply for a grant. more info below

[Brian Burns @brian_burns]

@justalexoki Meditation (focusing on the breath, bringing your attention back to it when distracted) does wonders. Even 20-30 minutes makes a massive difference in quality of experience

[Tim Hwang @timhwang]

The coexistence of RSI with a fundamentally bottlenecky world will give rise to a late 2020s that feels like this: the rich strangeness of hyperfuture living alongside large swaths of unchanged or even regressing social practice, a temporal redshift all over your perception

[Brian Burns @brian_burns]

@moseskagan > Freeze rents, forcing properties into disrepair
> Fine owners for code violations
> Bill owners for state-enforced, unprofitable repairs
> Unprofitable property forced to auction
> First dibs for qualified, state-aligned nonprofits

Calculated recipe for asset seizure

[Brian Burns @brian_burns]

@rickyhorwitz Golden Gate Park!

[spor @sporadica]

"we built an inventory of basically every single thing on the planet you could possibly need, we sell it to you at low prices, and then it shows up on your doorstep in ~24 hours like magic"

if any company / CEO on Earth deserves a quadrillion dollars, it's Amazon and Bezos

[Brian Burns @brian_burns]

@lawheroezV2 @harvey @ItsJulioPereyra and @nikogrupen would know!

[Brian Burns @brian_burns]

@harvey now generating fully synthetic 142-page credit agreements

[Julio Pereyra @ItsJulioPereyra]

No lawyers were harmed in the making of this Credit Agreement

[Niko @nikogrupen]

Synthetic data is crossing the uncanny valley

This is a 142 page synthetic credit agreement that we recently generated @harvey

[Niko @nikogrupen]

New RSI paper from @alibaba_cloud research that uses @harvey LAB: Firm Knowledge for its main results.

Recursa is a proposal for how to adapt agents to a new domain without human experts or a stronger teacher model -> write skills from knowledge documents, then have parallel learners practice on tasks and keep only the edits that help.

Link: https://t.co/EVbNXorEJ2

Glad to see LAB continuing to drive research progress, esp on continual learning. Nice work @ekzhu @Alibaba_Qwen

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

We are at the 'ballot initiative to personally give me a billion dollars' stage of democracy in California.

[Brian Burns @brian_burns]

@saranormous Even autocorrect messes up my typing 90% of the time when it is trying to "help"

[Gabe Pereyra @gabepereyra]

Very cool work from @rikiyatakehi and @lateinteraction's lab at MIT.

They show GPT-6 Astra can read the weights of a Qwen model and update them directly to improve performance.

In early results MATH-500 jumped from 7.9% to 48.1% and it even wrote a Breakout policy from scratch.

The two research questions I'm most excited about are whether this scales from billion-parameter models to trillion-parameter models and which stages of a modern post-training pipeline it could replace.

Today the largest open models are post-trained in several stages. Kimi K3 and DeepSeek-V4 train RL specialists and distill them into one model while GLM-5 and MiniMax-M3 run a chain of RL stages.

We're proud to support Omar's lab and to be working with them to scale this up to larger models and test it on LAB.

[Niko @nikogrupen]

Scaling Harvey Research

We’re scaling the @harvey research team and just posted multiple new roles:
- RE / RS, reinforcement learning + modeling
- RE / RS, data + evals
- RE, training infra

We're looking for high-agency researchers and engineers with strong research taste to tackle frontier problems for high-stakes, domain-specific knowledge work.

If you’re interested in doing research in the below or related areas, we're hiring in SF, NY, London, and more.

1. Evaluation, benchmarking, and environment design
2. Post-training, continual learning, and model–harness co-optimization
3. Long-horizon agent orchestration, planning, and credit assignment under partial verifiability
4. Distributed training and RL infra for fast, reliable experimentation at scale

Feel free to DM or apply using the link below.

[Keagan @KeaganCW]

This guy came in clutch yesterday

[Clive @cliveunger]

welcome to the shape store 🟦 🟡 🔺

[Sir Lemmings @sir_lemmings]

Paid a visit to the recursive shape store

[Brian Burns @brian_burns]

@sir_lemmings Woah

[Brian Burns @brian_burns]

@TheRealAdamG @OpenAI Congratulations! Didn’t know you were the first salesperson there