Oct 14, 2026

Can Open Models Keep Up With OpenAI and Anthropic? | Nathan Lambert

Nathan Lambert, AI researcher and founder of the nonprofit Trillium, joins Lisha Li to examine how durable the gap is between frontier closed labs like OpenAI and Anthropic and open-weight models. The discussion covers compute, data, and talent as the drivers of model progress, how much distillation really matters for Chinese open labs, the evolution of post-training toward RL environments, and why open research on RL environments and recursive self-improvement is needed to demystify what frontier systems can and cannot do.

Oct 13, 2026

Robots That Predict the Future: Dyna-2 & Physical AI — Jason Ma, Dyna Robotics

Dyna Robotics is pioneering physical AI with Dyna-2, a world-action model trained on over a million hours of human video, predicting future states and generating robot actions. Co-founder Jason Ma explains how this enables robots to learn new tasks from minimal demonstrations, tackles the robotics data bottleneck with synthetic data and self-improving models, and details their full-stack approach, including custom semi-humanoid hardware for real-world deployments at Din Tai Fung. The discussion delves into diffusion transformers, agentic harnesses for hour-long workflows, the "Bitter Lesson" of scaling data, and the distinction between world-action models and VLAs, all driven by a deployment-first research culture.

Oct 08, 2026

$450K TO TRAIN A FRONTIER AI MODEL?

Thomson Reuters CTO Joel Hron explains why the company built Thomson, a domain-specific frontier model adapted from open-weight checkpoints like Qwen 3.5, using decades of proprietary legal and tax content and expert judgment. The conversation covers the training lifecycle from realignment and continual pre-training to agentic RL, the economics ($450K final run versus roughly $40M total), team structure, CoCounsel orchestration, verification challenges in legal and tax, and the future balance between open-weight and frontier models.

Sep 18, 2026

Pacing the AI frontier, IBM Granite 4.2 & Meta’s Muse assistant

This episode explores the critical debate around pacing frontier AI development, driven by Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei's call for slowdowns amidst growing concerns over AI risks. It then delves into IBM's latest Granite 4.2 release, highlighting innovations in agentic models, speech recognition, and advanced training techniques like synthetic data and mid-training. Finally, the discussion pivots to Meta's new Muse agentic AI assistant, examining its technical design, the strategic rationale behind Meta's push into productivity, and the inherent privacy dilemmas and trade-offs between utility and user comfort that define the future of personal AI.

Aug 20, 2026

Going In Deep On Data | YC Paper Club

Three experts discuss the evolving landscape of data in AI, covering its critical role in model performance, challenges in sourcing and evaluating expert data, the development of advanced data generation techniques for diffusion models, and the complexities of multilingual pre-training.

Aug 18, 2026

Rich Sutton and Khurram Javed: Why AI Models Stop Learning, and How to Start It Again

Rich Sutton and Khurram Javed discuss their radical vision for AI at Oak Lab, advocating for truly continual learning agents that learn from their own experience, rejecting synthetic data due to the "Big World Hypothesis," and outlining a path to overcome catastrophic forgetting with "continual backprop" for a trillion-parameter, self-maintaining mind, while critiquing LLMs as only a fraction of intelligence.