We built high-throughput materials labs in Menlo Park to create a loop between experiments and models. The labs generate fresh data, the models learn from it, and then help us decide what to try next. Using only 1,300 H200s, plus months of our experimental data, we mid-trained and RL’d an open-source model to surpass GPT-6 Astra on our analysis benchmark. We call it Neon. This is real footage from our lab. We’re focusing first on hard problems in materials science, including superconductors, magnets, and semiconductor materials. Read our blog posts below.

It is not inevitable that India be poor. Its people are certainly capable of being extremely productive. Indian immigrants to the United States and elsewhere have been very successful. India’s government has been stable since independence, and largely democratic throughout. While their growth rate has picked up, they have not had the booming success of China. India was socialist for a long time; but then, so was China. Why isn’t India a developed country yet? To suggest a monocausal explanation would be an exercise in arrogance. India has many problems, and there is no one simple trick to growth. Nevertheless, I hold that much of India’s stagnation is due to its judicial system. Its slowness and inefficiency has far reaching consequences, making it impossible to efficiently run a business. The facts are simple. There are at least 50 million cases pending — nobody knows how many for sure. The Supreme Court has 69,000 piled up, waiting for resolution. Of these, 18,000 have been pending for more than thirty years. Every family has a horror story. I have a friend whose dad, near the beginning of his career, was named in a suit involving a bank. Growing up, every few years his dad would be called to appear in court. My friend is 40 now. His dad has retired. The suit remains ongoing. The Indian government estimated that, at current capacity, it would take 324 years to clear all of the cases. That was in 2018. Since then the number of pending cases has doubled. India has one of the lowest ratios of judges to population in the world, with 21 judges for every million people. Surprisingly, this is an improvement over the past — in 2002 the ratio was 10 for every million. The EU average is 200 per million, and the US 150 per million. One reads with grim amusement concern that a low number of judges — say, 100 per million — will endanger the rule of law in Ireland or Denmark. If that is what it takes to endanger, then rule of law in India is positively extinct. Nobody knows the average time it takes a court case to be resolved for sure, but it is somewhere around five years for it to be resolved by the high courts (the second tier of courts) and 13 years for the Supreme Court. 40,000 new civil suits are filed every day, covering everything from land disputes to layoffs to bankruptcy. 66% of all pending civil cases involve claims and counterclaims over who owns what land. The upshot of this is that firms cannot resolve disputes through the courts. They must instead turn to extrajudicial methods, and the most common of them is keeping the business in the family. In the late 2000s a team of researchers – Bloom, Eifert, Mahajan, McKenzie, and Roberts – conducted a randomized controlled trial on management quality in Indian textile mills. Prior work by Bloom and Van Reenen had shown that family run firms in the West, in particular those run by an eldest son, were poorly run compared to professionalized businesses. We would not be able to tell in India, however. Of the 126 firms they surveyed — a comprehensive census of the firms in the towns near in and around Mumbai — every single one of them was family run. The single strongest predictor of firm size was not productivity, revenue, or profitability. It was simply the number of male family members in the family. These are not simple mom-and-pop shops either, with but a few employees. As Bloom et al write, “These firms are also complex organizations, with a median of two plants per firm (plus a head office in Mumbai) and four reporting levels from the shop floor to the managing director. In all the firms, the managing director was the largest shareholder, and all directors were family members. Two firms were publicly quoted on the Mumbai Stock Exchange, although more than 50% of the equity in each was held by the managing family.” (p. 9) The experiment by Bloom et al was to test how much management mattered by randomly assigning some firms to receive management training. They found that a firm receiving the management training increased their annual profits by 17%, or almost $300,000 a year. Since these are extremely simple interventions — things such as “write down what types of yarn you have and how much” and “have a schedule for repairing machines”, one wonders why the companies never adopted them on their own. You can read the rest here: nicholasdecker.substack.com/…

Wonderful news on @ludwigstraub getting the Clark medal! When Ludwig got tenure, his @HarvardEcon macro advisees and coauthors put together this slide deck full of anecdotes showing how great Ludwig is as an academic and as a person: drive.google.com/file/d/1H0k…