One of the persistent questions in model development is whether reasoning actually involves… reasoning. As in: are we seeing actual logical conclusions, or just better recall of knowledge and patterns from the training set? LLMs are trained on, roughly, the web, which makes answering that question tricky: almost everything shows up in some form. A model that appears to “reason” through a physics problem could just be pattern-matching an irritated Reddit reply it saw during training.

When I was writing recently about MoEs I was focused mostly on the architectural reasons that we use them. One thing I hadn’t considered is that they might actually be better at learning as well.

In the heady world of AI progress, context lengths have seen somewhat more languid growth. After rapid progress up to the 100-300k token range, they’ve largely stayed there for frontier models. We now have a couple of 1m token models that appear economically viable¹, with Gemini and Sonnet, but Opus 4.5 (for example) stuck with the 200k window of its predecessor.

There are two really good ways to learn the deep fundamentals of a field. One we could call the Carmack/Ilya method: get an expert to give you a list of the seminal papers, systematically work through them, and in the process develop a deep, grounded intuition. This seems to work. The second is: funny tweets.

I think the most important AI question is, at some level, how do you deploy it so that it is a genuinely positive force across a wide spectrum of people.

Back in 1817 David Ricardo published a very influential theory on an interesting question: Why trade, and particularly why trade when you are better at producing something than other countries?

Language modelling is one of the great ideas in ML: if you train a model to accurately predict the next word in a sequence of text¹, you are forcing it to learn a deep structure for human language. Because language is how we map reality, hopefully then you can do many useful things. This turned out to be right!

I don’t think even the most perceptive forecaster would have identified a 90s LucasArts video format being a flashpoint for a discussion of the state of the security. We live in an age of generative AI agents rampaging through OSS though, and that seems to be what has happened.