#Reasoning

AIARC Prize reports that the top Kaggle entry reached 24% on the ARC-AGI-2 private dataset at $0.20 per task, and that all winning solutions and papers are open source. The top verified commercial model, Opus 4.5 (Thinking, 64k), scored 37.6% at $2.20 per task, while a Poetiq refinement on Gemini 3 Pro reached 54% at $30 per task. The author argues that refinement loops are the main driver of 2025 progress, and says ARC-AGI-3 is planned for early 2026.

Why it matters: The post links 2025 competition results to a broader argument about refinement loops, showing how benchmark outcomes are being read as evidence of AI reasoning progress.

AIMoonshot AI released Kimi K2 Thinking, an open-source thinking model that interleaves step-by-step reasoning with tool calls across 200 to 300 sequential invocations. The model is a 1T-parameter mixture-of-experts with 32B activated parameters and a 256k context window, and it uses native INT4 quantization for roughly 2x faster generation. The model card reports benchmark results on HLE, BrowseComp, and other tests, and recommends vLLM, SGLang, or KTransformers for deployment.

Why it matters: The model card gives benchmark tables, quantization details, and deployment settings, letting readers compare Kimi K2 Thinking against GPT-5 and other models on specific tasks.

AIThinking Machines Lab describes on-policy distillation, which samples rollouts from a student model and has a teacher grade each token with reverse KL. The authors report that this matches Qwen3-style reasoning results at a fraction of RL's cost, with AIME'24 reaching 70% in about 150 steps from a 400k SFT checkpoint. The method also helps recover instruction-following behavior lost during fine-tuning on internal documents.

Why it matters: The post explains why on-policy distillation gives dense per-token feedback, letting a small model match RL results at much lower compute cost.

AIStanford and Cognition AI researchers introduced Kevin-32B, a 32B-parameter model trained with multi-turn reinforcement learning to write CUDA kernels. On KernelBench, it solves 89% of tasks at best@16 and achieves 65% average correctness over eight refinement steps, versus 53% for o4-mini and 51% for o3. Its best@16 speedup is 1.41x, and multi-turn training outperforms single-turn training as refinement steps increase.

AICognition tested OpenAI's o1-mini and o1-preview in a simplified Devin-Base agent, comparing them with GPT-4o on its internal cognition-golden benchmark. The chart reports Devin-Base scores of 25.9% with GPT-4o, 34.6% with o1-mini, and 51.8% with o1-preview, versus 74.2% for the production Devin. The post also describes the benchmark's realistic environments, simulated users, and agent-based evaluation.

Why it matters: The post explains how Cognition evaluates coding agents with autonomous, environment-based tests, which shows how base-model swaps are measured in practice.