Cole Brown

“i’m sorry, it’s so strange to be on the internet.”

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@kalomaze @notnullptr Perhaps a dumb an but how do you assess the strength of the pretrain vs post training/alignment disasters? Is it just the vibe of having latent capabilities or something more quantitative?

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@willccbb The CLI is really slick / well designed. Nails balance of minimalism + features you'd expect to be preoductive. Even has a nice commenting flow for reviewing plans. It was pure pain using it with Grok Build lol but pumped to use Composer in it.

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

Nathan has worked tirelessly to bring forward the (truly) open research frontier. If we secure a positive outcome with ML & LLMs, it will have been in no small part due to him and others who dedicate themselves to the dissemination of knowledge at great personal opportunity cost.

[Nathan Lambert @natolambert]

My time at Ai2 / @allen_ai has come to an end.

Ai2 is a wonderful place. The last 2.5+ years building Olmo, Tulu, and other projects will be one of the peaks of my entire career. I'm extremely thankful for my teammates and the open community who made this work possible.

For me, it's time to try something different. I will still be working in the open model & open science spaces (more news on that soon). In the meantime I'll be spending a few months learning, chatting with a broader network, getting married (!!) and most importantly recharging from pouring my soul into this place.

I've attached the note I shared with the team and some fun photos from our time together. I'll keep cheering for Ai2 and am excited to see what you build next.

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@danveloper Can’t believe you made an entire side project just to show off you’ve got Mythos smh 😂

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@SeanTAllen Damn, but it can lie to the rest of us 😭

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@patdennis I will not take them for granted ever again 😭 I’m daisy chaining DGX sparks and lookin at old A100s online

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@patdennis Yeah, I can def see that. Esp a price/param count increases. Big q is: do closed frontier buy all the compute? Would be quite sad, but can see it happening. Or do neo clouds get enough to serve open models. Otherwise we’re looking at 120b as max param count for average joes lol.

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@patdennis Sorry for the wall of text lol but for some optimism on US side: Nvidia, Arcee, and Zyphra are all training models on the open frontier and are very, very strong. Reflection, too, ostensibly, albeit without a release yet.

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@patdennis I test all the open models pretty extensively and am a big believer fwiw. But the benchmarks are poor indicators of performance across many vectors. Chinese labs tend to benchmax quite a bit. Still very excited for the M3 weights release and will find many uses!

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@willccbb They actually innovated this with the 2.7 release lol

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@code_star I wonder if dynamics will shift further this direction if frontier labs continue towards and beyond Mythos class models, selling fewer higher value tokens to large enterprises.

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@ericzakariasson Any model card or similar info for this one?

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@fascinated @boomkatonline @raspberryjones Mine is almost entirely boomkat distro exclusives lol which means a lot of early PAN, Andy Stott’s Modern Love, and anything Mark Fell or his progeny ever release

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

I've been fortunate to have access to Claude Opus 4.8 for the last 20 minutes. Here's what you need to know 🧵

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@hamandcheese I think there is a huge distinction when it comes to biological 1 of 1 life vs frozen weights that can be distributed ad infinitum. I wonder if that’s what ppl are really grappling with? On that set of questions I’m far less sure.

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@hamandcheese I think questions of consciousness are likely being used as a stand in for whether or not it is ethical to shut down an AI or use it to work for us. I’d argue it’s undoubtedly conscious, and that consciousness in humans is nothing special, mechanically. Just my feeling.

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@code_star I kind of assumed results like this were downstream of training on benchmarks. But def still believe in minimal, expressive harnesses.

[Cole Brown @dtcb]

@willccbb @stochasticchasm Will might need compaction smh