Kalomaze is 20 yo Researcher at Prime Intellect

TIMESTAMPS

00:00:00 - Teaser

00:01:06 - Intro

00:01:49 - Organic Influence

00:02:46 - “Extremely Silly Jester”

00:04:04 - School Days & Diving into ML Research

00:09:27 - Developing “Research Taste” & The Art of Selection

00:11:45 - Dropping College, Parents’ Reaction & The Plan Ahead

00:18:13 - How a Reddit Post Led to a Job at Shopify

00:23:53 - Why He Chose Prime Intellect Over Other Offers

00:29:27 - A Day in the Life: Workload at PI

00:31:53 - Verifiers, GRPO & Semi-Verifiable Rewards

00:40:02 - Progress on Synthesizers

00:43:28 - The Environment Hub: A Hugging Face for RL?

00:47:47 - How Research Ideas Emerge

00:51:38 - Defining “Taste” in Research

00:54:15 - The Future of Supervised Fine-Tuning

01:01:48 - The Flaw in “Pure Reasoner” Models & Thoughts on GPT-OSS

01:05:34 - Perspective on the Chinese Open-Source AI Surge

01:07:58 - The Art of Training a Good RL Model

01:10:08 - How to Learn a New Field: A Hacker’s Approach

01:12:33 - Handling Disagreements with Experienced Researchers

01:14:49 - Recipe for RLHF

01:19:47 - Scaling Bigger Models vs. Designing Better Rewards

01:26:31 - Rethinking Progress & The Post-AGI Narrative

01:29:27 - The Most Unexpected Part of Working at Prime Intellect

01:30:09 - Trivia Round Begins

01:30:25 - Code Reviews from Will?

01:33:43 - A Hidden Secret About Will

01:34:26 - The Underrated Mindset That Gives Him an Edge

01:36:18 - Take on AI Tech Twitter / TPOT

01:38:16 - How Kalomaze Shaped Up + Advice

01:41:17 - Podcast Wrap-Up

The Lore of 20yo ML Researcher at Prime Intellect | RL, Agents and Intelligence | Kalomaze, Prime Intellect

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