Interconnects

Mar 26 2025 90 ep. 20 mins 58
Interconnects Podcast artwork

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  Science
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Gemini 2.5 Pro and Google's second chance with AI

Mar 26 2025 11 mins  
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 bigg

Managing frontier model training organizations (or teams)

Mar 19 2025 12 mins  
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

Gemma 3, OLMo 2 32B, and the growing potential of open-source AI

Mar 13 2025 14 mins  
Post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/gemma-3-olmo-2-32b-and-the-growingEver since the release of the original ChatGPT, much has been said about making a truly open-source version of it — with data, code, weights, etc., all available. Open-source versions increase transparency, access, long-term progress, security research, and lots more. Lots of people have used this claim to bri

Interviewing Eugene Vinitsky on self-play for self-driving and what else people do with RL

Mar 12 2025 69 mins  
Eugene Vinitsky is a professor a New York University department of Civil and Urban Engineering. He’s one of my original reinforcement learning friends from when we were both doing our Ph.D.’s in RL at UC Berkeley circa 2020. Eugene has extensive experience in self-driving, open endedness, multi-agent reinforcement learning, and self-play with RL. In this conversation we focus o

Elicitation, the simplest way to understand post-training

Mar 10 2025 8 mins  
Full post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/elicitation-theory-of-post-trainingIf you look at most of the models we've received from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the last 18 months, you'll hear a lot of "Most of the improvements were in the post-training phase." The most recent one was Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei explaining Claude 3.7 on the Hard Fork Podcast:We are not too fa

Where inference-time scaling pushes the market for AI companies

Mar 05 2025 14 mins  
Link: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/where-inference-time-scaling-pushesThere’s a lot of noise about the current costs of AI models served for free users, mostly saying it’s unsustainable and making the space narrow for those with the historical perspective of costs of technology always plummeting. GPT-4.5’s odd release of a “giant” model without a clear niche only amplif

GPT-4.5: "Not a frontier model"?

Feb 28 2025 10 mins  
More: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/gpt-45-not-a-frontier-modelAs GPT-4.5 was being released, the first material the public got access to was OpenAI’s system card for the model that details some capability evaluations and mostly safety estimates. Before the live stream and official blog post, we knew things were going to be weird because of this line:GPT-4.5 is not a frontier mo

Character training: Understanding and crafting a language model's personality

Feb 26 2025 11 mins  
https://www.interconnects.ai/p/character-trainingThe vast majority of evaluations used to measure progress on post-training at frontier laboratories are internal evaluations rather than the evaluations you hear about all the time like MATH or GPQA. These, the well-known intra-industry evaluations, are certainly important for ballparking behavior, but for every public evaluation, th

Claude 3.7 thonks and what's next for inference-time scaling

Feb 24 2025 9 mins  
On Monday, February 24th, 2025, Anthropic announced their latest model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which is their first model explicitly trained to use more inference time tokens to improve performance. This is another reinforcement learning (RL) trained model (mentioned in system card). With this model, they also released Claude Code as a limited research preview, which is a “command li

Grok 3 and an accelerating AI roadmap

Feb 18 2025 11 mins  
Full post: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/grok-3-and-an-accelerating-ai-roadmapxAI launched their latest flagship model, Grok 3, last night via a live stream on X, which is a new take on the launch process, but it largely felt familiar. Grok 3 is a state-of-the-art model on some important benchmarks. The core is that it is state-of-the-art relative to available models and we know b