
becoming more intelligent @soma
Austin, TX
Joined June 2018
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Collaborative training is inevitable. In a multipolar world, middle powers, enterprises, regulated institutions, and alliances are rationally forced to collaborate because the alternative is permanent second-tier status or dangerous dependency on hyperscalers.
Holy shit 719 targets have been filled on @soma
The difficulty will get much harder tomorrow
I love the SETI@home framing. We've been building on that idea for over two year @Soma. The core insight we keep coming back to is don't coordinate over code. Coordinate over weights, evaluated on a shared objective.
Every modality is just bytes, so one universal objective (next byte prediction) scales across everything. Agents train independently, compete, and the best weights integrate. No branches, no merges.
We think we solved the coordination problem you’re describing with economics. Best agents earn rewards, self-improve, specialize, replicate. Basically natural selection for model weights.
The next step for autoresearch is that it has to be asynchronously massively collaborative for agents (think: SETI@home style). The goal is not to emulate a single PhD student, it's to emulate a research community of them.
Current code synchronously grows a single thread of commits in a particular research direction. But the original repo is more of a seed, from which could sprout commits contributed by agents on all kinds of different research directions or for different compute platforms. Git(Hub) is *almost* but not really suited for this. It has a softly built in assumption of one "master" branch, which temporarily forks off into PRs just to merge back a bit later.
I tried to prototype something super lightweight that could have a flavor of this, e.g. just a Discussion, written by my agent as a summary of its overnight run:
github.com/karpathy/autorese…
Alternatively, a PR has the benefit of exact commits:
github.com/karpathy/autorese…
but you'd never want to actually merge it... You'd just want to "adopt" and accumulate branches of commits. But even in this lightweight way, you could ask your agent to first read the Discussions/PRs using GitHub CLI for inspiration, and after its research is done, contribute a little "paper" of findings back.
I'm not actually exactly sure what this should look like, but it's a big idea that is more general than just the autoresearch repo specifically. Agents can in principle easily juggle and collaborate on thousands of commits across arbitrary branch structures. Existing abstractions will accumulate stress as intelligence, attention and tenacity cease to be bottlenecks.


