
Jeremy Scheffel
962 posts

Jeremy Scheffel
@Scheffeler
exploring ai | working on https://t.co/BaIekjEDz5 | dad of 2 | sharing book notes & thoughts I find interesting






Test project I had @KellyClaudeAI build over the weekend: The missing courses to take someone from vibe coding to real engineering with AI. Need to tweak a bit before it ships; Kelly is new to curriculum development.

We invited Claude users to share how they use AI, what they dream it could make possible, and what they fear it might do. Nearly 81,000 people responded in one week—the largest qualitative study of its kind. Read more: anthropic.com/features/81k-i…


A breakthrough in real-time video generation. As a research preview developed with @NVIDIA and shared at @NVIDIAGTC this week, we trained a new real-time video model running on Vera Rubin. HD videos generate instantly, with time-to-first-frame under 100ms. Unlocking an entirely new creative paradigm and bolstering the foundations of our General World Model, GWM-1. Real-time generation opens a fundamentally different design space for video models and world simulation. We're investing in co-designing our models alongside advances in hardware to keep pushing this frontier.



What's your AI adoption level? (according to Steve Yegge)





This is wild. theaustralian.com.au/business/techn…

A small thank you to everyone using Claude: We’re doubling usage outside our peak hours for the next two weeks.

Claude can now build interactive charts and diagrams, directly in the chat. Available today in beta on all plans, including free. Try it out: claude.ai


“Make the models cheap to use” “Great, they all forgot how to code” “Now 10x the price”

Three days ago I left autoresearch tuning nanochat for ~2 days on depth=12 model. It found ~20 changes that improved the validation loss. I tested these changes yesterday and all of them were additive and transferred to larger (depth=24) models. Stacking up all of these changes, today I measured that the leaderboard's "Time to GPT-2" drops from 2.02 hours to 1.80 hours (~11% improvement), this will be the new leaderboard entry. So yes, these are real improvements and they make an actual difference. I am mildly surprised that my very first naive attempt already worked this well on top of what I thought was already a fairly manually well-tuned project. This is a first for me because I am very used to doing the iterative optimization of neural network training manually. You come up with ideas, you implement them, you check if they work (better validation loss), you come up with new ideas based on that, you read some papers for inspiration, etc etc. This is the bread and butter of what I do daily for 2 decades. Seeing the agent do this entire workflow end-to-end and all by itself as it worked through approx. 700 changes autonomously is wild. It really looked at the sequence of results of experiments and used that to plan the next ones. It's not novel, ground-breaking "research" (yet), but all the adjustments are "real", I didn't find them manually previously, and they stack up and actually improved nanochat. Among the bigger things e.g.: - It noticed an oversight that my parameterless QKnorm didn't have a scaler multiplier attached, so my attention was too diffuse. The agent found multipliers to sharpen it, pointing to future work. - It found that the Value Embeddings really like regularization and I wasn't applying any (oops). - It found that my banded attention was too conservative (i forgot to tune it). - It found that AdamW betas were all messed up. - It tuned the weight decay schedule. - It tuned the network initialization. This is on top of all the tuning I've already done over a good amount of time. The exact commit is here, from this "round 1" of autoresearch. I am going to kick off "round 2", and in parallel I am looking at how multiple agents can collaborate to unlock parallelism. github.com/karpathy/nanoc… All LLM frontier labs will do this. It's the final boss battle. It's a lot more complex at scale of course - you don't just have a single train. py file to tune. But doing it is "just engineering" and it's going to work. You spin up a swarm of agents, you have them collaborate to tune smaller models, you promote the most promising ideas to increasingly larger scales, and humans (optionally) contribute on the edges. And more generally, *any* metric you care about that is reasonably efficient to evaluate (or that has more efficient proxy metrics such as training a smaller network) can be autoresearched by an agent swarm. It's worth thinking about whether your problem falls into this bucket too.











