kai

llm eval & data from real world

[Tibo @thsottiaux]

Here is how to enable a 1M-token context window in Codex for GPT-5.6 Sol.

Even though we have tuned the context limit in Codex to be set optimally when it comes to performance and cost, this is a common ask, so here it is documented.

A larger context window lets Codex retain more code, tool output, and conversation history before summarizing older material. You need a model that supports it. And GPT-5.6 Sol, for example, has a documented 1,050,000-token window.

Open ~/.codex/config.toml and add or update these settings at the top level, before any [section] headers:

```
model = "gpt-5.6-sol"
model_context_window = 1000000
model_auto_compact_token_limit = 900000
```

The first setting selects the model. The second tells Codex to use a one-million-token context budget. The third starts automatic history compaction around 900,000 tokens, leaving some headroom. Restart Codex client and start a new session after saving.

To try the configuration for a single CLI session without changing your defaults:

```
codex -m gpt-5.6-sol \
-c model_context_window=1000000 \
-c model_auto_compact_token_limit=900000
```

Have fun, but also know that we tuned the default carefully!

[Z.ai @Zai_org]

Introducing GLM-5.3: Built to Code. Ready for Cyber Defense.

- Top-tier coding and agentic capabilities, achieved through post-training on the 743B base model
- A major leap in cybersecurity, setting a new standard among open models

Tech Blog: https://t.co/ekQkO83jCv

[DeepSeek @deepseek_ai]

🧩 DeepSeek Harness v0.1 is now available in Developer Preview!

🔹 We’re opening it up to developers building agent harnesses worldwide and open-sourcing the codebase in MIT license.
🔹 Powered by the Cordis meta-framework, DeepSeek Harness is an agent harness built around one core idea: Everything is a plugin. Models, tools, skills, sessions, sandboxes, filesystems, loops, orchestration, and UI are ALL implemented as plugins, and can be mixed, matched, replaced, and extended.

Try it now!
https://t.co/2YWSvJHhKA

[kai @knightwolf30]

@GavinSBaker https://t.co/Vf9PKyEVck

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@cognition Grok 4.7 will exceed all current models.

That said, Anthropic is a great company and will probably release improved models soon.

However, the SpaceX training corpus is so awesome & unique that I would be shocked if any model is better at real-world engineering than 4.7.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@cognition Grok 4.7 will exceed all current models.

That said, Anthropic is a great company and will probably release improved models soon.

However, the SpaceX training corpus is so awesome & unique that I would be shocked if any model is better at real-world engineering than 4.7.

[Naval @naval]

Open-source AI models do not threaten frontier lab profitability.

The most valuable sectors of the economy - investing, product development, war, cybersecurity, even scientific discovery - are adversarial and competitive in nature.

You pay to win, or someone else will.

[Jerry Tworek @MillionInt]

When I heard some time ago that Meta is the third best AI lab right now, I was skeptical.

But every day passing has been reinforcing that it’s actually true.

TBD strategy has succeeded and congratulations to the team that made it!

The world needs more successful AI labs

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

Announcing Discovery Loop!

I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.

♾

Learn more at: https://t.co/Rv3LMdLluK

[Christian Szegedy @ChrSzegedy]

IMO, the next steps are:

Within 1 year: strictly better than human AI in all problem-solving aspects of math.

Within 2 years: producing mathematics becomes so cheap, AI will produce mathematical theories for all kinds of applied domains on the fly at need.

Mathematics becomes the true infrastructure of all of engineering and applied sciences (including AI, biology, optimization, cybersecurity, etc) where approaching things theoretically was too expensive to be practical.

[Sebastien Bubeck @SebastienBubeck]

yes, nonsofic groups exist: this statement is one of many new beautiful results proved by Astra, our next major model.

We're releasing 10 such Astra proofs, complete with lean certificates and CoT walkthroughs for each of them. The results are wide-ranging, from von Neumann algebras (disproof of Connes' Rigidity Conjecture) to better bounds for high dimensional sphere packing, for circuit complexity, for monochromatic triangles in multicolored graphs, and more.

More thoughts here: https://t.co/8SjXONeh38

[netsky remix @iron_redux]

🚨🚨Breaking news from the math world! Open AI just proved nonsofic groups existed! GPT 5.6 Sol continues to replace mathematicians!!!

[Sebastien Bubeck @SebastienBubeck]

This one is personal for me: 4 years ago I decided to go into AI development because I thought there was a chance that by the end of the decade AI could be better than me at math: well it happened ahead of schedule, 2026 instead of 2030 😅.

It is 100% clear that science is being fundamentally transformed before our eyes, and it is NOT aspirational anymore to say that AI will accelerate science. But this will only happen if scientists can actually use SOTA models. Science is best done by scientists.

The new ChatGPT for Academics is designed exactly for this purpose: we want to empower our users and not hold this power for ourselves. I can't wait to see where the frontier of knowledge will be very soon, we have so many questions we want answers to!!!

https://t.co/PLoN482ZVT

[Liam Fedus @LiamFedus]

Join us to train AI that understands the physical world and can design what comes next.

Coding agents worked in part because of objective, fast, and cheap RL envs. But what's often overlooked is that there's no big expertise gap between AI researchers and SWEs. An AI researcher can easily assess correctness, coding strategies, and more.

In science, we must bridge the gap and look for brilliant folks who go deep and get the boring details right in order to create systems that otherwise would not exist.

[Jensen Huang @JensenHuang]

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.

AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.

The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.

https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb

[Amir Efrati @amir]

Moonshot mudslinging CHART

In battle over Chinese AI restrictions, it’s Anthropic & OpenAI versus pretty much everyone else in Silicon Valley

[Suhail @Suhail]

The Chinese do not need to distill anymore. They've climbed up the proverbially tech tree that to climb higher, they need to do actual frontier work. Distillation is marginal.

Any lobbying or legislation that calls for banning open weight models in the name of "distillation" is total BS. This is a fight against future American innovation.

The labs know that open weight models completely commoditize their revenue generator. They know that we will optimize it to 1/100th the costs. They know that we will stop concentrating our workloads on them. If we start using open models, they lose the understanding of workloads that they can build products around to *replace* your products as they move up to the app layer.

Remember: *they* trained on humanity's data and didn't pay a cent. If you own intelligence, you can tax humanity.

Do not let them fool you.

[Kimi.ai @Kimi_Moonshot]

Introducing Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence

🔹 2.8 Trillion Parameters, 1 Million Context, Native Multimodal
🔹 Kimi Delta Attention enables up to 6.3x faster decoding in million-token contexts
🔹 Attention Residuals deliver ~25% higher training efficiency at <2% additional cost
🔹 Built for long-horizon agentic coding and self-evolving workflows

Kimi K3 is now live on on https://t.co/zrk6zZxZUo, Kimi Work, Kimi Code, and the Kimi API.
Open Weights by July 27, 2026.

🔗 API: https://t.co/XCrgjXAqMw
🔗 Tech blog: https://t.co/YTfiMSNM1f

[AI at Meta @AIatMeta]

We’re excited to introduce Muse Spark 1.1, a significant upgrade from the first Muse Spark model we released earlier this year.

Along with this release, we are launching a public preview of the new Meta Model API where developers can access Muse Spark 1.1.

The model is also available now in "Thinking" mode in the Meta AI app and on https://t.co/wHkMPH82ZH.

Learn more: https://t.co/zGcA3XaWpN

[Rohan Pandey @khoomeik]

periodic is building stargate for scientific data

our automated labs &amp; simulations churn out trillions of tokens to teach models about the world of atoms

that scientific data, absent on the internet, enables our AI to accelerate R&amp;D in domains that other models can’t

[will depue @willdepue]

A Stargate for Data

Labs are on a trajectory towards >$100B/year of data spend by 2030. As we begin the trillion-dollar compute project, we need to think about the equivalent civilizational-scale effort for the other core ingredient: data.

At the foundation of the scaling revolution is a simple empirical law: deep neural networks improve smoothly, near magically, as you scale two things in proportion — (1) the size of the model and (2) the amount of data you train on. And despite the scaling laws being brutally diminishing, we’ve successfully bitten the bullet of logarithmic scaling with exponentially larger clusters and datasets, and received incredible new capabilities in return.

But this exponential scaling is bound to hit some limits. Oddly enough, compute has compounded fairly smoothly without limit, with trillions flowing into hypercluster buildout. Instead, we’re starting to hit the limits of an exponential demand for data. Gone are the days of being purely in the compute-limited regime, where we had effectively infinite internet data but never enough GPUs, we’re now entering a data-limited regime.

Luckily, this limitation is coinciding with staggering improvements in AI capabilities. Incredibly, we seem to have a real line of sight towards automating a majority of knowledge work with the methods we have today. RL + pretraining, and the data for each, will be generally sufficient to achieve most economically valuable tasks, given some minimal algorithmic progress and continued compute scaling.

In a data-limited world, economic progress & scientific acceleration will be directly bottlenecked by our coverage in each domain. We need to see data collection as imperative, deserving the same civilizational ambition we’ve given compute.

The internet as a one-time subsidy

It’s underrated how much all progress in AI owes everything to the blessing of the internet, this one-time civilizational subsidy to deep learning, decades of unintentional accumulation of a perfect dataset: every book, blog post, image, video, paper, discussion, etc. all digitized and freely available. Without the internet, we’d likely see comparably minimal progress in AI today, and in fact, if you notice where systems currently underperform, it’s almost always a domain where web coverage is limited and data is private, expensive, non-digitized, or non-existent.

But we’re running out of it. There are only about 300 trillion tokens of useful public human text, and the internet doesn’t produce nearly enough new high-quality data to match what scaling demands — we’re soon to hit the limits of public data for pretraining. And though the advent of RL bought us reprieve — chain-of-thought RL needed a new form of untapped data, gradable math & coding tasks, also available online — we’re quickly running dry of hard tasks for RL as well.

Why do we need so much data anyways? Humans learn comparably in far less time, needing just one textbook where language models might need the equivalent of hundreds to learn a new topic. It’s possible we discover methods that are massively more data efficient — synthetic data, data efficient architectures, other exotic algorithms — but fundamental progress is slow and highly unpredictable, and the recipe we have just works today.

And, while I’m wary of getting too deep here, even arbitrary data efficiency can’t replace data that just doesn’t exist in the first place. There’s a massive amount of missing information on the web: the dark matter of the internet — tacit knowledge, undocumented processes, etc. — most of which was never published and lives only inside organizations, the physical world, or just in people’s heads. I’ll leave it here and say, for reasons far longer than I can fit in this post [1], it’s best to operate on the assumption that our insatiable desire for data will continue as it has for the last decade.

There will be >$100B/year in data spend by 2030

We’re not screwed yet, of course. Only a fraction of useful data in the world is on the public internet, the rest is stored inside private datasets, corporations, personal archives, universities, governments, and otherwise. Labs can and will continue to license these private datasets, or create them from scratch, like Anthropic’s book scanning project. And we’ll increasingly task human experts to manufacture new high-quality data, with a large fraction of hard RL training tasks already being sourced this way.

But collecting this data, unlike before, will be expensive. As the free internet dries up and demand for data rises, we should see labs investing equally in data as compute, likely spending a significant fraction of their compute budgets on data. As we see trillions spent on compute, we should also expect hundreds of billions spent on data (human data & collection budgets), given their equivalent importance. And, notably, data spend is already tracking this way: total data spend across vendors, not counting internal lab efforts, is already roughly $7 billion per year. It’s quite reasonable we’ll see >10x by 2030.

Data is the moat

Data becoming increasingly private will also majorly shift the competitive landscape. While compute is a commodity — everyone buys the same chips and builds the same clusters — data really isn’t. The big reason why frontier models have felt eerily similar to one another, until now, is they were trained on substantially the same internet (pretraining data variability across labs seems pretty low). As labs diverge onto more exclusive, manually collected corpora, I think models will begin to increasingly diverge.

OpenAI pulling ahead in mathematics and Anthropic in cybersecurity isn’t an accident. I really think laser-focused collection of high-quality midtraining tokens, custom RL tasks, environments, with dedicated research effort, has driven much of the visible progress in the last year. James Betker has an excellent blog about “the ‘it’ in a model is the dataset”: model architecture and compute buy you efficiency and order-of-magnitude performance, but ultimately, models, of any architecture, are such incredible approximators of their dataset that the core meat of a model boils down to just that, nothing else. Data is a major moat.

AGI long, ASI short

As I’ve tweeted before, I’m confident that, despite the narrative, the data labeling industry will continue to fuel great businesses and be an excellent AGI long, ASI short. The argument is just: By the time the AGI labs no longer need data, it’s probably over for everything else too [2]. In this frame, the last companies left should be the data companies, as the last speck of economically relevant data is sucked in. And these companies are already among some of the fastest-growing companies in history: Mercor, founded three years ago, is rumored to be doing $2 billion in revenue with something like a few million expert labelers under contract.

While these businesses are very non-stationary, what type of data is needed shifts constantly, I don’t think that diminishes their value. The long-tail of the economy is long, and the value isn’t diminishing as you extend farther into more obscure information: as models get more capable, the value of the marginal dataset goes up, not down. Automating a full job means covering its full distribution of tasks, tools, edge-cases, and long-horizon loops. There’s some O-ring logic to it: a dataset that buys a 1% bump can justify a previously unjustifiable collection cost when it’s the difference between a system that does 99% of a job and one that does all of it [3].

The competitive dynamics of the data industry are still evolving but as demand for data is increasingly niche, ultra high-quality, expert-generated, I think we’ll see real consolidation. Again, contra-narrative, we’ll probably see true competitive differentiation built on brand, quality control of data (which, from personal experience, can vary massively), as well as in network effects from the talent networks themselves over time. We’ve already seen rapidly shifting data type demand work in favor of incumbents, benefiting those with early knowledge of where the market is headed.

The binding constraint

It’s truly remarkable that we seem to have the recipe — pretraining + RL — to absorb most economically valuable work, despite being far from a lot of what we expected from “AGI”. The same way chess engines revealed we never needed general intelligence to solve chess, as we originally thought, we’ll soon realize that software, mathematics, and the vast majority of the economy (including physical, just running ~3 years behind!) are the same. If recursive self-improvement or some other algorithmic breakthrough arrives, that’s wonderful, but we really don’t have to wait for it. The binding constraint between here and an automated economy isn’t that, it’s data coverage: every app, workflow, edge case, process, etc. sitting in private stores or someone’s head.

Ultimately, while we make tremendous strides in more efficient model architectures, and clusters like Stargate equip us with zettaflop-scale compute, we really aren’t making rapid progress collecting the data we lack.

We’ll soon live in a world where we have the methods & compute to accelerate scientific progress or economic growth, but not the data. And we’re already there today: frontier models would surely be as good at accounting/many medical tasks/legal advice as they are at software engineering if we only had the same pretraining & RL coverage as we did for code.

I really want to drill this in: The speed at which we automate the economy is going to be directly rate-limited by our ability to collect data about it.

Worth noting that under this assumption, with data as defensible and directly proportional to economic & scientific progress, data should also be considered a national strategic asset like compute. Imagine what we’d do in a world where we had a Manhattan Project-effort for AI and needed to mobilize data collection as a limiting factor. We should be concerned about China, with greater state capacity and authoritarian economic control, being capable of mobilizing data collection at national scale, potentially compounding their economy and scientific output faster than us down the line.

A Stargate for data

I’m leaving my complete ideas for a future post, as this one is already far too long, so I’d really like to pose the question here. Stargate exists because we organized trillions of dollars, international strategy, gigawatts around compute as a fundamental ingredient. What would equivalent ambition look like for data?

Obviously, scaling data collection, a heterogeneous mass of information across the economy, isn’t going to be as clear as scaling compute, as a homogenous infrastructural effort. A core division will be first, coverage — all uncaptured knowledge sitting across the economy/science/physical world and all that simply isn’t recorded — and, secondly, sheer volume in the domains we already train on: more hard math tasks, more high-quality web text, way more coding data, more legal drafts, etc.

I have a post coming soon which breaks down my proposals. There’s a lot of room for creativity. Quickly, we’ll probably want to start with a deep census of what we have and what we’re missing, predict what the 2030 model will still be bad at and work backward to what we should be collecting today. You can probably license a large amount, leveraging high lab valuations to buy datasets or companies altogether. There’s an adversarial nature to a lot of this collection with firms, so there’s lots of engineering to do this correctly. We should go convince important companies to turn off deletion policies, even if we’re not buying from them yet. Data flywheels in consumer products will be massive. Confidential training, government legislation for grant-funded research, running companies at a loss for their data, etc.

We’re headed towards hundreds of billions in expenditure, national prioritization, and major data limitation on the horizon. We have a great opportunity to think creatively about what a megaproject for data would look like: How do we, deliberately this time, construct the next internet’s worth of data?

Footnotes:

[1]: I’ll probably soon publish my much longer post explaining my position on data efficiency and why the value of this data is still pretty high in most worlds regardless of new algorithms.

[2]: The “AGI freeroll” bet: heads you win, tails ASI flips the world upside down anyways.

[3]: We already see a glint of validation of this point, given the data market is strongly tilting towards ultra-high-quality agentic data, rather than unskilled labeling — niche expert workflows, live environments, and evaluations requiring increasingly obscure talent & knowledge — yet shows increasing, not decreasing, revenues.