Alex Dimakis

4.7K posts

Alex Dimakis

Alex Dimakis

@AlexGDimakis

Professor, UC berkeley | Founder @bespokelabsai |

Berkeley, CA Katılım Nisan 2009
2.7K Takip Edilen23.9K Takipçiler
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Alex Dimakis
Alex Dimakis@AlexGDimakis·
We are excited to announce what we have been working on for more than six months: The OpenThoughts-Agent dataset and OpenThinker-agent models. More than 100 ablations on data curation for RL environments for coding agents. Our data recipe is SOTA over all open-data agents in their class. We post-train a Qwen-3-32B to get 26% on Terminal Bench and open all our training sets, data pipelines, experiments and models. Some lessons we learned for training agents vs reasoning: 1. The Diversity of tasks matters more, compared to reasoning (OpenThoughts-Agent vs OpenThoughts). You could teach reasoning from math and it transfered widely but RL environments seem to teach more specific capabilities, so each domain must be covered. 2. Filtering high quality and hard questions remains very important. (Was also true for OpenThoughts reasoning). We discuss several ways of filtering. 3. Synthetic re-writing and task augmentation didn’t give significant benefits in our experiments. Sampling multiple teacher rollouts per task did work (was also true for reasoning). Even when keeping the dataset size fixed, multiple answers gave benefits. The Multiple answers mystery is still valid for agentic environments. 4. Stronger models are not necessarily better teachers (was also true for reasoning). The stronger teacher for Quen-3 was GLM-4.7-AWQ and the Terminus2 harness in Daytona. We are releasing 100k tasks and trajectories. 5.Benefits from GRPO remain limited and still on-going. I currently officially hate GRPO.
Richard Zhuang@RichardZ412

How can we train small agentic models that are highly capable of terminal use and coding? Announcing OpenThoughts-Agent + OpenThinkerAgent-32B, the strongest Qwen-3 based open-data agentic model: 44.8% avg across 7 agentic benchmarks! (1/n)

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Melissa Pan ✈️ ICML
Thrill to share that we received the best paper award for the FAGEN workshop at ICML 2026 🚀 It felt surreal walking through the poster session and seeing so much exciting work on agent failures. Where “failure taxonomy” become a standard terminology in the field, and MAST being one of the shared, systematic ways to organize negative examples. 🙏 Back in 2023, the MAST team had many discussions about how to share this kind of insight with the community and having the failure taxonomy as the main contribution, when such papers were still uncommon at top ML conferences. Now seeing an entire subcommunity form around agent failures is incredibly exciting.🔥 Despite agents being deployed everywhere, I still believe we’re only at the beginning. MAST captured the prevalent failure modes we observed at the time, but as agents expand into more diverse domains, we need more task-specific failure understanding to build better systems. Stay tuned for our full "MAST v2" paper! 🥁 And huge thanks to the FAGEN organizers (@wzenus) for bringing this community together, and to all the reviewers! 🫡
Melissa Pan ✈️ ICML tweet media
Alex Dimakis@AlexGDimakis

Best Paper Award to our ICML Workshop paper 'Fantastic Adaptive Taxonomies and How to Use Them'. Let me summarize briefly what the paper is about: Failure taxonomies are becoming increasingly important. We show that failure taxonomies can be used in multiple ways: 1. As a test-time scaling tool for best-of-N judges, 2) as a mutation feedback mechanism in optimization loops and 3) as runtime feedback for coding agents. Previously people used MAST and other hand-made fixed failure taxonomies. In this paper we show how to create the failure taxonomy adaptively and dynamically: We observe agent rollouts and create an adaptive failure taxonomy, bespoke to the agent weaknesses and task challenges. These adaptive taxonomies give a massive boost: On Terminal Bench 2 we get 89.9% with Opus 4.6 / Forgecode harness and the adaptive taxonomy used with a Best-of-N Judge, outperforming fixed taxonomies by 15%. (1/n)

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Alex Dimakis
Alex Dimakis@AlexGDimakis·
Pure art to see a master explain how general relativity is making forces appear because we move on curved lines and we just don’t know it.
Dwarkesh Patel@dwarkesh_sp

Adam Brown (@A_G_I_Joe) is back! General relativity is said to be the most beautiful idea the human mind has ever produced. Most of us will never get to fully appreciate its elegance by taking the 20-lecture graduate course Adam taught on it at Stanford. But in the video below, Adam distills the key idea at its heart so clearly and compellingly that even I could keep up lol. At the core of general relativity, Einstein is trying to figure out the principle behind a particular coincidence: that the mass that resists acceleration and the mass that gravity pulls on just happen to be exactly the same. Adam then leads us through the path of insight which Einstein called his “happiest thought.” Then Adam lectures on black holes. First, by showing how even under special relativity you could create a perpetual motion machine if black holes weren't truly black. And then, by explaining why the observations of an infalling observer and a distant bystander to the black hole would be so radically different Adam leads Blueshift, the team at Google DeepMind cracking science and reasoning. Which gave us the opportunity to discuss at the very end how close we are to AIs that could rediscover general relativity from scratch. Stay till the close for some philosophy of science. 0:00:00 – The coincidence that led Einstein to general relativity 0:16:42 – Gravity is a consequence of curved spacetime, not a force 0:31:46 – Why black holes prevent unlimited energy extraction 0:47:12 – Black holes are the ultimate power plants 1:13:50 – What falling into a black hole would actually feel like 1:18:51 – The three ways we know black holes are real 1:24:21 – The first time we saw gravity bend light 1:29:33 – How far can AI get without experimental evidence? Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube/Spotify to watch. Enjoy!

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Alex Dimakis
Alex Dimakis@AlexGDimakis·
@porestar I think CC+ custom tools is the first step, but latest research can optimize the actual harness in a loop. The key thing needed is environments to measure the performance of the harness and rollouts+rewards. From this, a loop agent can optimize the harness code+tools.
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Lukas Mosser
Lukas Mosser@porestar·
@AlexGDimakis When you say harness here do you mean harness = Claude Code + custom tooling or harness = implement something Claude codeish for your own company + custom tooling?
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Alex Dimakis
Alex Dimakis@AlexGDimakis·
Best Paper Award to our ICML Workshop paper 'Fantastic Adaptive Taxonomies and How to Use Them'. Let me summarize briefly what the paper is about: Failure taxonomies are becoming increasingly important. We show that failure taxonomies can be used in multiple ways: 1. As a test-time scaling tool for best-of-N judges, 2) as a mutation feedback mechanism in optimization loops and 3) as runtime feedback for coding agents. Previously people used MAST and other hand-made fixed failure taxonomies. In this paper we show how to create the failure taxonomy adaptively and dynamically: We observe agent rollouts and create an adaptive failure taxonomy, bespoke to the agent weaknesses and task challenges. These adaptive taxonomies give a massive boost: On Terminal Bench 2 we get 89.9% with Opus 4.6 / Forgecode harness and the adaptive taxonomy used with a Best-of-N Judge, outperforming fixed taxonomies by 15%. (1/n)
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Melissa Pan ✈️ ICML
Come to Hall A #4211 between 10:30-12:30 today if you want to learn about ✨agent research opportunities✨ and where should agent research be heading to! #icml #icml2026
Melissa Pan ✈️ ICML tweet mediaMelissa Pan ✈️ ICML tweet mediaMelissa Pan ✈️ ICML tweet media
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Alex Dimakis
Alex Dimakis@AlexGDimakis·
@Konstantine Very interesting- seems like Covid was a phase transition, and probably Cursor/claude code are also visible.
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Konstantine Buhler
Konstantine Buhler@Konstantine·
If AI is destroying opportunity, someone forgot to tell the entrepreneurs. America is seeing ~500,000 new business applications a month. A record pace! But that’s not all…
Konstantine Buhler tweet media
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Alex Dimakis
Alex Dimakis@AlexGDimakis·
The global wealth report does not specify the methodology. I'll need to dig into the Databook to see how they got it. But I now have a theory! In the US, retirements rely on 401K and similar accounts which are accounted in net worth. But in France the vast majority is on a pension system. Probably the key difference is how they accounted the pension into the net worth of adults. They are probably assuming the French pension system will not drastically reduce pensions in the distant future, which is, you know, questionable.
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Alex Dimakis
Alex Dimakis@AlexGDimakis·
This was very surprising to me. From my quick ChatGPT searches, homeownership rates in the United States and France seem close, (US 65.3%, France 61.5%) and Median home price in the United States is roughly $395,000, whereas France $237,000. In the US 60% of homeowners carry a mortgage, whereas in France, only 36.2%. The Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances says the median household net worth in the U.S. is $192,900. I don't understand how they got to the 69k median net worth per adult in the US.
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Daniel Ahmad
Daniel Ahmad@ZhugeEX·
Surprising (not really) stat from the new UBS Global Wealth Report 2026. The US ranks #2 when you look at average (mean) wealth per adult, but drops to #28 when you look at the median. ubs.com/content/dam/as…
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Giannis Daras @ ICML 2026
Giannis Daras @ ICML 2026@giannis_daras·
Let's talk about Dataloops at ICML. We will talk about generative models that refine their own datasets. This dataset-model co-evolution process has risks 🙈. We mitigate them by "trusting less" the synthetic generations. Come tomorrow at our poster, #2611, Hall A (10:30am).
Giannis Daras @ ICML 2026 tweet media
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will brown
will brown@willccbb·
every 2 months there's some big post that's like "what if someone worked on data why is no one doing this" and then everyone that works on data is like "we're working on data btw actually". it's fun i like it
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Alex Dimakis
Alex Dimakis@AlexGDimakis·
@willccbb Thanks ! I believe the best teacher is one that is good but also close to the pretraining data distribution of the student. They speak the same language.
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will brown
will brown@willccbb·
@AlexGDimakis semi-related: i've found myself frequently referencing OpenThoughts lately as an explanation for why MOPD + same-family teacher OPD work much better than OPSD "QwQ is a better teacher than R1 for Qwen2.5-7B" is a very compelling result!
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Melissa Pan ✈️ ICML
From SF to Seoul, i thought i would see some different (non-AI) ads 😉
Melissa Pan ✈️ ICML tweet media
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Peter Wagner
Peter Wagner@peter_wagner·
@Wing_VC's investment in Bespoke is the result of an exhaustive exploration of the space. We looked long and hard for the right team and were fortunate to meet @madiator and @AlexGDimakis! Limitless opportunity here
Wing VC@Wing_VC

.@bespokelabsai raises $40M to build the environments that train reliable agents 🎉 AI agents are unreliable. That's the single biggest thing standing between today's demos and the coworker-grade agents everyone keeps promising. Bespoke is fixing it at the root, and the key ingredient is the environment an agent learns in: a realistic, simulated world where it practices a task and gets graded on whether it actually finished. Founded by @madiator and @AlexGDimakis, Bespoke is already behind some of the most-used open work in AI. Read more on the @Wing_VC blog about our investment. wing.vc/content/invest…

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Vivek Gopalan
Vivek Gopalan@vvkgopalan·
I (Temu Dwarkesh) got to sit down with @madiator & @AlexGDimakis and talk about AI in CS education, RL scaling, how people will program capabilities into agents in the future, and interesting historical results from the first wave of reasoning models. Big day for @bespokelabsai
8VC@8vc

Much of the AI narrative revolves around architecture research, compute scaling & buying human data. Very few understand the deep technical discipline of "data research," which has driven many of the gains in model capabilities. @vvkgopalan sits down with @madiator & @AlexGDimakis, founders of @bespokelabsai, a company defining the category of data research. (00:00) Introducing Mahesh and Alex (03:40) Teaching a 1000 person ML class at Berkeley / changes in CS education in the age of AI (06:10) Open source data for frontier model training, OpenThoughts & training models for data curation (12:00) Why multiple-answer yields more performant models, benefits of keeping unverifiable examples in datasets (17:20) RL scaling laws / introduction to Bespoke (19:45) "Environment-driven Development" (28:35) New capabilities in frontier models & coding agents (34:30) Market outlook for RL environments (42:30) Exciting recent research and how we arrived at today's state of RL (50:00) Bespoke's Series A

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Alex Dimakis
Alex Dimakis@AlexGDimakis·
Thrilled to announce our $40M fundraise! We would like to thank our investors (Wing, Mayfield, 8VC, The House Fund) and angels (Jeff Dean, Dheeraj Pandey, Tristan Handy), Tasso Argyros, and several others from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and our customers in frontier labs and enterprises that we work with every day. Bespoke Labs will make AI agents reliable and make it easier to optimize their performance.
Bespoke Labs@bespokelabsai

We’re thrilled to announce a $40M investment that will fuel our mission to make AI agents reliable. For the past two years, we've been heads-down doing world-class data curation research and shipping best-in-class reinforcement learning environments for training and optimizing AI agents. This funding lets us go a lot deeper on both. Thank you to our investors @Wing_VC, @MayfieldFund, @8vc, @thehousefund and our angels such as Jeff Dean, Dheeraj Pandey, Tristan Handy, and several others from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta. And thanks to the frontier labs and enterprises we work with every day, for sharing our vision for a future where agents can run autonomously for weeks and months at a time. (more below)

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