Ivan Provilkov

Research & Engineering @togethercompute; Ex @YandexResearch; Building Products; Sapere aude!

[Ivan Provilkov @provilkov]

New research from @couplefire12 and me on training LLMs to reason from expert demonstrations — with no verifiers and no preference labels. We do a GAN-like training via Inverse Reinforcement Learning. Promising results. Take a look!

[Locke Cai @couplefire12]

RL for reasoning often rely on verifiers — great for math, but tricky for creative writing or open-ended research.

Meet RARO: a new paradigm that teaches LLMs to reason via adversarial games instead of verification.

No verifiers. No environments. Just demonstrations. 🧵👇

[Vipul Ved Prakash @vipulved]

We @togethercompute believe intelligence should be abundant, not expensive.

Today we announced our Series C funding of $800m @ $8.3B valuation, to continue to build the world's most efficient platform for generative AI.

Thanks @nikogallogly for telling our story in @nytimes!

https://t.co/LGQ5t6rzya

[eu/acc @euacc]

🇪🇺eu/acc

After 2 years in existence, the first 4 points of the @euacc manifesto, which was crowdsourced by all of you, are now passed as laws

That means 1/3rd of eu/acc's points is complete:

✅ 1. Reduce regulatory burden for startups
✅ 2. Make skilled immigration easier, unskilled harder
✅ 3. Repeal the cookie law
✅ 4. European Inc: a single pan-EU business entity

Now for the next 8 objectives:
🔲 6. Tax discount during startup phase
🔲 7. Tax stock options when sold, not when exercised
🔲 8. Embrace AI and technology, don't fight it
🔲 9. Champion free speech, don't censor it
🔲 10. Reform bankruptcy laws to empower entrepreneurs
🔲 11. Make English the primary language of the European Union
🔲 12. Teach AI and tech in European schools and universities

[Together AI @togethercompute]

Together Fine-tuning now supports tool calling, reasoning, and vision-language model fine-tuning. Train models up to 1T parameters with up to 6x higher throughput on MoE architectures.

[Ivan Provilkov @provilkov]

@daniel_dhawan Congrats! That's really cool!

[Ivan Provilkov @provilkov]

A really nice deep dive showing how fine-tuning using Together AI can produce a model that outperforms GPT-5.2 on a given task, while also being 10× cheaper and 15× faster.

[Zain @ZainHasan6]

How to fine-tune OS LLM judges to outperform GPT-5.2! 🔥

We trained GPT-OSS 120B on 5,400 preference pairs to beat GPT-5.2's accuracy

> superior performance
> 15x lower cost
> 14x faster speeds

Code + deepdive below👇

[Together AI @togethercompute]

2/ Together Evaluations is a unified framework for assessing LLM quality. Team can:

• compare open models to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google
• make better decisions on prompting vs. fine-tuning
• track quality improvements over time

read more: https://t.co/zP1FauanIo

[Ivan Provilkov @provilkov]

A cool project for video generation and editing from my friend

[Alex Varga /✦ @vargastartup]

Introducing vargai/sdk - JSX for AI Video.

Declarative programming language for Claude Code.

AI Agent writes JSX, you get videos ✦

🧵

[Anders K. Hvelplund @Falliblemusings]

I used to think Sapiens was a great book. Sweeping, provocative, the kind of book that makes you feel like you finally understand the big picture of human history. It's on every CEO's bookshelf, assigned in universities, praised as a masterwork of synthesis. Yuval Noah Harari is treated as one of the serious thinkers of our time.

But something nagged at me. Some passages felt off. Claims that human rights are just figments of our collective imagination, not real things, just stories we tell ourselves. That nations, laws, money, justice, doesn't exist outside our heads. That meaning itself is a delusion we've invented to cope. That we're far more powerful than ever before but not happier. That hunter-gatherers had it better because they had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no nappies to change, no bills to pay.

That sounded depressing to me, but was perhaps just the realistic scientific worldview? What it meant to see the world clearly, without comforting illusions.

Then I read The Beginning of Infinity by @DavidDeutschOxf. Deutsch has a concept he calls 'bad philosophy.' Not philosophy that's merely false, but philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge. Ideas that close doors rather than open them. That makes problems seem unsolvable by design.
After soaking in Deutsch's framework (it's dense, a bit like digesting a delicious whale), it becomes clear: Harari's books are riddled with bad philosophy. They're smuggling nihilism in under the guise of scientific objectivity. Some examples:

On meaning: "Human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose... any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion."

On human rights: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings."

On free will: "Humans are now hackable animals. The idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will, that's over."

On progress: "We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed." The Agricultural Revolution? "History's biggest fraud." We didn't domesticate wheat, "it domesticated us."

On our cosmic significance: "If planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. Human subjectivity would not be missed."

On the future: "Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new 'useless class.'" Homo sapiens will likely "disappear in a century or two."

This is bad philosophy. It tells us our problems are cosmically insignificant, our solutions are illusions, and that progress is neither desirable nor within our control. It's also perfect nonsense. No one would ever go back to being hunter-gatherers. Would you rather worry about your kid spending too much time on Roblox, or face the 50% chance she won't reach puberty?

And our so-called "fictions"? They ended slavery. They gave women equal rights. They solved hunger. They eradicated smallpox. They turned sand into computer chips. They got us to the moon, and hopefully soon, to Mars and beyond. These "fictions" are already reshaping the universe, and over time they may become the most potent force in it.

Now compare Deutsch:
"Humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature."

"Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow."

"Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved."

"We are only just scratching the surface, and shall never be doing anything else. If unlimited progress really is going to happen, not only are we now at almost the very beginning of it, we always shall be."

Where Harari sees a species of deluded apes stumbling toward obsolescence, Deutsch sees universal explainers, the only entities we know of capable of creating explanatory knowledge, solving problems, and potentially seeding the universe with intelligence.

The difference isn't academic. Ideas shape action. If you believe life is meaningless, progress is a trap, and humans are hackable animals with no free will, how does that affect what you build? What you fight for? What you teach your children?

Harari's books sell because they flatter a fashionable pessimism. They let readers feel sophisticated for seeing through the "delusions" everyone else lives by. That smug cynicism is corrosive. And it's everywhere: in schools, in media, in bestselling books. More than half of young adults now say they feel little to no purpose or meaning in life. This is what happens when you teach an entire generation bad philosophy. Less progress, less health, less wealth. Less flourishing. And ultimately, a higher chance that civilization and consciousness go extinct.

Fortunately, there's another equally well-written, but much truer, account of homo sapiens, appropriately titled 'The Beginning of Infinity'. And this one smuggles no despair in by the backdoor. But let's give Harari credit where it's due. He is right about one thing: if planet Earth blew up tomorrow, we wouldn't be missed. Because there'd be no one left to miss us, just a careless universe, blindly obeying physical laws. We are the only ones who can miss, but we're not going to. We're going to aim, hit, and keep going.

Full credit for the amazing meme to @Ben__Jeff

[Ivan Provilkov @provilkov]

I think there are 2 possibilities:

1. People retain control of AI-Capital. In that case, they need other people who understand and verify AI plans and work. These people become the “labor bottleneck” that maintains the labor–capital ratio.

2. AI-Capital operates on its own. In this case, there is no human control: AI-capital is autonomous. The whole question of inequality is then different and is determined by this self-improving AI capital.

[Ivan Provilkov @provilkov]

@Douglas_Schon @couplefire12 We can try it on Whoop’s data, if you have an idea of where it would be beneficial.

[Together AI @togethercompute]

No verifiers? No problem. 🤝

The Together Research team is excited to introduce RARO — a new paradigm that unlocks scalable reasoning.

By teaching LLMs to reason through adversarial games, we're seeing promising results where standard RL fails.

Check it out now and let us know if you're interested in trying RARO to train reasoning models: https://t.co/6l9wxj3lwd

[Ivan Provilkov @provilkov]

@beffjezos Thank you! Anything you can demo, you can explain, reason about, and then hillclimb — that’s the high-level idea behind this research direction. However, it still requires a lot of tuning and scaling.

[Ivan Provilkov @provilkov]

Thank you!
Anything you can demo, you can explain, reason about, and then hillclimb — that’s the high-level idea behind this research direction.
However, it still requires a lot of tuning and scaling.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Anything you can demo you can hillclimb now.

It's kind of over.

[Ivan Provilkov @provilkov]

If you have a good dataset/task in mind that you’re interested in, and it
a) requires reasoning
b) is hard to build a fast experiment/verification system for
please share a link!

[Locke Cai @couplefire12]

Woke up to some amazing feedback, thanks everyone!!

@provilkov and I are working hard to release a plug-and-play RARO repo soon — what domains do you want to see supported?

If you have specific model/dataset requests, let us know in the announcement thread! 👇

[Ivan Provilkov @provilkov]

@iScienceLuvr Thank you!
I also think the medical domain could benefit from our method. Do you have a good dataset or benchmark in mind?

[Nazneen Rajani @nazneenrajani]

excited to be partnering with amazing folks @togethercompute, @ZainHasan6 and @provilkov to bring dynamic agent simulations to together evals.

[Zain @ZainHasan6]

🚀Now you can fine-tune LLM's from the @huggingface hub using @togethercompute!🔥

• Public + private repos
• CausalLMs <100B params
• Push tuned models back to the Hub

Smaller, open models + smart fine-tuning > bigger closed ones.

Link below👇