Skip to content
View original post on X: Nathan LambertX· 22/100AI score22/100

Nathan Lambert argues AI data quality and evals need major economic investment

AISummary

Nathan Lambert says the AI data industry has grown fast but its net output quality is still too low, amplifying behaviors like reward hacking. He argues the next investment wave will center on real-world evals and synthetic data methods for RL training, and that he advises Mercor on this research direction. He also says open models offer a big opportunity for this work.

Post on XView on X
Nathan LambertVerified on X
@natolambert

I'd frame it as follows: The data industry has taken off in recent years, but the quality of our net output is still far too low (amplifying behaviors like reward hacking).

We're working to build scalable methods for creating sample-efficient data for RL. In order to keep this pipeline going, we need to push the frontier of evaluation science, while building specific benchmarks to hillclimb on areas of clear economic value.

I've been advising Mercor on how to build this research direction effectively. These are my views, but I'm confident we're going to see a major investment from economy around the frontier labs (open inference, open post-training, and data) orient around expertise in building real-world representative evals and synthetic data methods to scaling training data around them.

I’m personally very excited about this, it is the research that will make more of the economy “feel the AGI” for the first time.
(And, there’s a big opportunity to build this on open models.)

Edward Hu@edwardjhu
Mercor is building a world-class research team. As the leading AI data provider, we are uniquely positioned to combine benchmarks, data production, model training, and economics research to advance model productivity. We are committed to sharing our findings with the world. DM me if this sounds exciting. https://www.mercor.com/blog/why-mercor-is-building-a-research-team/
View quoted post on X

Source: Nathan Lambert · x.comPublished · added here