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.

Jun 04, 2026

The Art & Science of Benchmarking Agents — Vincent Chen, Snorkel AI

Vincent Chen of Snorkel AI discusses the crucial gap between rapidly advancing AI capabilities and our ability to measure them. He presents a framework for building effective benchmarks, encompassing task quality, distributional diversity, model headroom, and robust evaluation methodologies, alongside the "art" of having a clear thesis, inspiring research roadmaps, and prioritizing researcher UX. He concludes by outlining three critical axes for future benchmarks: environment complexity, autonomy horizon, and output complexity, to better reflect real-world AI applications.

Jun 02, 2026

Task Fidelity Scaling Laws — Kobie Crawdord, Snorkel

An experiment by Snorkel AI reveals that in agentic AI training, the quality of tasks is paramount. Using the same model and compute, fine-tuning on high-quality tasks yielded a 6% performance improvement, a 5x greater uplift compared to the 1% gain from low-quality tasks. The key difference lies in the nature of the tasks: high-quality tasks are genuinely harder, featuring more tool calls and cleaner failure modes that provide a meaningful learning signal. In contrast, low-quality tasks often fail due to ambiguity and environmental noise, hindering effective model improvement.