
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)
Alex Dimakis
4.7K posts

@AlexGDimakis
Professor, UC berkeley | Founder @bespokelabsai |

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)



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)

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!



One reason we built custom coding and data agent benchmarks internally at Databricks (e.g. databricks.com/blog/benchmark…). Academic benchmarks are great and people will build better ones, but you also care about YOUR tasks, which are often different. Each company needs its own "loop".




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)















.@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…


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


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)