Oct 10, 2026

Small Models, Big Results: Training a Finance Agent for Under $500 — Charles Dickens, Snorkel AI

Snorkel AI and UC Berkeley's Sky Computing Lab show that a 4B Qwen3 model, trained with reinforcement learning for under $500 using the rLLM framework, beats its 235B sibling on expert-validated financial question answering built from SEC 10-K filings. The talk covers the FinQA dataset construction and verification, common failure modes of frontier models, transfer to multi-table and general tool-use tasks, and ablations showing that simple data and binary rewards outperform more elaborate setups, since the real bottleneck is disciplined tool use rather than reasoning depth.

Jul 31, 2026

Reinforcement Learning without Verifiable Rewards — Will Brown, Prime Intellect

Will Brown's talk addresses the critical challenge of applying Reinforcement Learning to real-world tasks where verifiable rewards are absent. He outlines how Primordial AI tackles this by leveraging environments as the core anchor for building reward signals. Key strategies include using LLMs as "judges," grounding tasks in production traces or document corpora, and employing "reverse direction" techniques to generate training data. Brown also details methods for calibrating task difficulty, identifying reward hacking, and fostering continual learning by treating model optimization as a science, emphasizing the use of compute to refine environmental signals and abstract human expertise.