Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedJacob Effron: belief
23 Apr 2026 Latent Space AIE Europe Debrief + Agent Labs Thesis: Unsupervised Learning x Latent Space Crossover Special (2026)
“What I’m less clear on is the kind of DIY RL use case, which I think is really mostly around, you know, improved, uh, quality for, for different things.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Jacob Effron
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 23 Apr 2026
- Publisher
- Latent Space
Transcript context
…Um, no, no. There, there actually is real value. Um, and you, you know that for a number of reasons. Like one, even when it’s not subsidized, people do choose it as like one of the top four or five. This is both composer two and, uh, suite 1.6 I one of the top five models. Like in a, in a fair market? In a free market, yeah. In a, in a, in a model switch. Or people do choose it and like, it’s not subsidized. Like, so that’s as good as it gets. Uh, but beyond that, like domain specific models, for example. For search with, with both, which both companies have absolutely makes, makes a ton of sense. Everyone says like, yeah, we should always, always do this. And honestly like, I think the infrastructure for that is becoming easier with, um, like thinking machines tinker thing as well as primary like, uh, lab stuff. Yeah, I mean like, this is one of those like reversal of the, the bitter lesson where you first bootstrap on the large models and the general purpose models to get big. And as you get very well-defined workloads that are just high quantity but not high variance, um, then you just distill down to a smaller model and run that on your own. Right. Which like totally makes sense. What I’m less clear on is the kind of DIY RL use case, which I think is really mostly around, you know, improved, uh, quality for, for different things. Obviously there’s probably like more efficient ways to, you know, get a smaller model that’s that’s faster and cheaper. And it’ll be interesting to see whether. You know, obviously you had, you know, uh, two, three years ago this whole case of companies that were, you know, pre-training and claiming better outcomes in, in their domains than getting kind of cooked as each model iteration improved. You know, I wonder whether that’s a, a similar story plays out in the, uh, in, in the, our all space. Yeah, for the focus on, on on pure outcomes and quality, not the cost side, which clearly your own models for cost at scale makes a ton of sense. I think there are this, there are two sides of the same coin. Like you basically always want to hold, uh, quality constant or trade off a little bit of quality for a drastic decreasing cost. And that’s true for everyone. Uh, one element I wanted to bring out, which is very much in favor of open models, is custom chips. So this would be cereus, but also talu. And then there’s a huge range of stuff in between. This has been a huge story this past year on just like everything non Nvidia is getting bid up, including like freaking MatX is working for, which is very, which is very rewarding for me, but I think one of those things where like, oh, like the suddenly, because the number of alternative. Hard, uh, hardware is increasing and the inference that you can get is insanely high. Like, um, we’re talking thousands of tokens per second instead of less than a hundred. So the trade off for qua quality doesn’t hold as much anymore because the speed is so high.…
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