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Evidence receipt / belief

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Shawn Wang: belief

23 Apr 2026 Latent Space AIE Europe Debrief + Agent Labs Thesis: Unsupervised Learning x Latent Space Crossover Special (2026)

“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.”

— Shawn Wang

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Shawn Wang
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
23 Apr 2026
Publisher
Latent Space

Transcript context

…Yeah. 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.…

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