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PODCAST

Interconnects

Audio essays about the latest developments in AI and interviews with leading scientists in the field. Breaking the hype, understanding what"s under the hood, and telling stories. www.interconnects.ai

technology

All Episodes

6:44

Kimi K2 and when "DeepSeek Moments" become normal

Interconnects ·

2025/07/14

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/kimi-k2-and-when-deepseek-momentsThe DeepSeek R1 release earlier this year was more of a prequel than a one-off fluke in the trajectory of AI. Last week, a Chinese startup named Moonshot AI dropped Kimi K2, an open model that is permissively licensed and competitive with leading frontier models in the U.S. If you're interested in the geopolitics of AI and the rapid dissemination of the technology, this is going to represent another "DeepSeek moment" where much of the

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10:36

The American DeepSeek Project

Interconnects ·

2025/07/04

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/the-american-deepseek-projectWhile America has the best AI models in Gemini, Claude, o3, etc. and the best infrastructure with Nvidia it’s rapidly losing its influence over the future directions of AI that unfold in the open-source and academic communities. Chinese organizations are releasing the most notable open models and datasets across all modalities, from text to robotics or video, and at the same time it’s common for researchers worldwide to read far more new

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9:57

Some ideas for what comes next

Interconnects ·

2025/06/23

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/summertime-outlook-o3s-novelty-comingSummer is always a slow time for the tech industry. OpenAI seems fully in line with this, with their open model “[taking] a little more time” and GPT-5 seemingly always delayed a bit more. These will obviously be major news items, but I’m not sure we see them until August.I’m going to take this brief reprieve in the bombardment of AI releases to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going. Here’s what you should know.1. o3 as

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30:26

Crafting a good (reasoning) model

Interconnects ·

2025/06/18

Why are some models that are totally exceptional on every benchmark a total flop in normal use? This is a question I was hinting at in my post on GPT-4o’s sycophancy, where I described it as “The Art of The Model”:RLHF is where the art of the model is crafted and requires a qualitative eye, deep intuition, and bold stances to achieve the best outcomes. In many ways, it takes restraint to land a great model. It takes saying no to researchers who want to include their complex methods that may degrade

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9:03

The rise of reasoning machines

Interconnects ·

2025/06/12

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/the-rise-of-reasoning-machinesNote: voiceover coming later in the day. I may fix a couple typos then too.A sufficiently general definition of reasoning I’ve been using is:Reasoning is the process of drawing conclusions by generating inferences from observations.Ross Taylor gave this definition on his Interconnects Interview, which I re-used on my State of Reasoning recap to start the year (and he’s expanded upon on his YouTube channel). Reasoning is a general space of

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13:53

What comes next with reinforcement learning

Interconnects ·

2025/06/09

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/what-comes-next-with-reinforcementFirst, some housekeeping. The blog’s paid discord (access or upgrade here) has been very active and high-quality recently, especially parsing recent AI training tactics like RLVR for agents/planning. If that sounds interesting to you, it’s really the best reason to upgrade to paid (or join if you’ve been paying and have not come hung out in the discord).Second, I gave a talk expanding on the content from the main technical post last

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5:38

How I Write

Interconnects ·

2025/06/06

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/how-i-writeMy experience with my recent years of writing is quite confusing — almost even dissociative. I've never felt like I was a good writer and no one really told me I was until some random point in time a year or two ago. In that time span, I didn't really change my motivation nor methods, but I reaped the simple rewards of practice. I'm still wired to be very surprised when people I respect wholeheartedly endorse me as "writing very well." Despite the disbelief,

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12:36

A taxonomy for next-generation reasoning models

Interconnects ·

2025/06/04

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/next-gen-reasonersOn Monday of this week we released RewardBench 2, Ai2’s next reward model evaluation and a project I’ve been personally invested in through its whole arc. Read more of my thoughts here.Tomorrow, I’ll be presenting a version of this post at the AI Engineer World’s Fair Reasoning & RL track. Come tomorrow and say hi if you’re around the next two days!The first generation of reasoning models brought us inference-time scaling and intrigue in seeing into

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15:13

Claude 4 and Anthropic's bet on code

Interconnects ·

2025/05/27

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/claude-4-and-anthropics-bet-on-codeClaude’s distinctive characteristics are having a best-in-class personality and the ability to effectively perform software engineering tasks. These characteristics both appeared in force with the first version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet — a major breakthrough model at the time and the model that pulled me away from ChatGPT for the longest. That model was released on Jun 20, 2024, and just the other day on May 22nd, 2025, Anthropic released

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8:47

People use AI more than you think

Interconnects ·

2025/05/21

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/people-use-ai-more-than-you-thinkI was on ChinaTalk again recently to talk through some of my recent pieces and their corresponding happenings in AI.Usage and revenue growth for most AI services, especially inference APIs, has been growing like mad for a long time. These APIs have been very profitable for companies — up to 75% or higher margins at times according to Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis. This is one of those open facts that has been known among the people

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15:14

My path into AI

Interconnects ·

2025/05/14

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/how-i-got-hereSome longer housekeeping notes this week:* I wrote briefly about a new open-source license, OpenMDW from the Linux Foundation, that seems very solid!* OpenAI launched the Reinforcement Finetuning (RFT) API. I think my take from when it was teased still holds up super well, you should read it if you haven’t:* In June, I’ll be speaking at some events in SF and Seattle, I’m looking forward to seeing some readers there. Talk topics are tentative:* AI Engineer

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8:05

What people get wrong about the leading Chinese open...

Interconnects ·

2025/05/06

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/what-people-get-wrong-about-the-leadingTwo editor’s notes to start.* First, we released our OLMo 2 1B model last week and it’s competitive with Gemmas and Llamas of comparable size — I wrote some reflections on training it here.* Second, my Qwen 3 post had an important factual error — Qwen actually did not release the base models for their 32B and large MoE model. This has important ramifications for research. Onto the update.People vastly underestimate the number of

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19:13

State of play of AI progress (and related brakes on...

Interconnects ·

2025/04/30

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/brakes-on-an-intelligence-explosionIntelligence explosions are far from a new idea in the technological discourse. They’re a natural thought experiment that follows from the question: What if progress keeps going?From Wikipedia:The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization. According to the most

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13:37

Transparency and (shifting) priority stacks

Interconnects ·

2025/04/28

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/transparency-and-shifting-priorityThe fact that we get new AI model launches from multiple labs detailing their performance on complex and shared benchmarks is an anomaly in the history of technology products. Getting such clear ways to compare similar software products is not normal. It goes back to AI’s roots as a research field and growing pains into something else. Ever since ChatGPT’s release, AI has been transitioning from a research-driven field to a

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11:09

OpenAI's o3: Over-optimization is back and weirder...

Interconnects ·

2025/04/19

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/openais-o3-over-optimization-is-backOver-optimization is a classic problem to reinforcement learning (RL) proper, the RL from human feedback (RLHF) that gave us ChatGPT, and now what we’re seeing with new reasoning models. All of these have a distinct flavor and different impacts.Over-optimization is what happens when the optimizer is stronger than the environment or reward function it’s using to learn. The optimizer finds bugs or lapses in the context of its training

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7:21

OpenAI's GPT-4.1 and separating the API from ChatGPT

Interconnects ·

2025/04/14

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/openais-gpt-41-and-separating-theRecently I gave another talk on RLVR experiments and I posted some thoughts on OLMoTrace — Ai2’s recent tool to let you look at the training data of OLMo 2.OpenAI has been making many small updates toward their vision of ChatGPT as a monolithic app separate from their API business. Last week OpenAI improved the ChatGPT memory feature — making it so the app can reference the text of previous chats in addition to basic facts about the

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11:19

Llama 4: Did Meta just push the panic button?

Interconnects ·

2025/04/07

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/llama-4Where Llama 2’s and Llama 3’s releases were arguably some of the top few events in AI for their respective release years, Llama 4 feels entirely lost. Meta has attempted to reinvent their formula of models with substantial changes in size, architecture, and personality, but a coherent narrative is lacking. Meta has fallen into the trap of taking too long to ship, so the bar is impossible to cross successfully.Looking back at the history of Meta’s major open

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15:58

RL backlog: OpenAI's many RLs, clarifying...

Interconnects ·

2025/04/05

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/rl-backlog-openais-many-rls-clarifyingI have a second blog where I post half-baked thoughts, sometimes previews of what comes here. If you’re interested, I posted some musings on OpenAI’s coming open model release.It’s obvious that reinforcement learning (RL) is having a total return to glory among the broader AI community, but its real successes are mostly the things people aren’t focusing on. More math and code datasets are important platforms — we know they’re

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11:50

Gemini 2.5 Pro and Google's second chance with AI

Interconnects ·

2025/03/26

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/gemini-25-pro-googles-second-ai-chanceGoogle, with its immense infrastructure and talent, has been the safe bet for the question of “Who will have the best models in a few years?” Google took a long time to get here, overcoming Bard’s launch and some integration headaches, and yet the model they launched today, Gemini 2.5 Pro feels like the biggest jump in evaluation scores we’ve seen in quite some time.It’s often hard to communicate how the models we are getting these

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12:43

Managing frontier model training organizations (or...

Interconnects ·

2025/03/19

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/how-to-manage-ai-training-organizationsIt is a closely guarded secret how the leading AI laboratories structure their training teams. As with other technology companies, the saying “you ship your org chart” still applies to training AI models. Looking at these organizational structures will reveal where research can be scaled up, the upper limits of size, and potentially even who uses the most compute.How modeling teams do and do not workA crucial area I’m working on

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140 results

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