Concept · 13 episode(s)

Scaling Laws

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Definition

Scaling laws are empirical regularities in how loss falls as a function of parameters, data, and compute — the equations that justify spending another order of magnitude on training. They’ve been a remarkably reliable planning tool and a remarkably awkward one when they break.

Episodes covering this

  1. 074
    How a Fifteen-Hundred-Dollar Training Run Matched Llama and Gemma on Reasoning
    Wang, Liu, Wang et al. · Sapient Intelligence·21 min·May 24, 2026
  2. 070
    When Models Know the Answer But Say the Wrong Thing Anyway
    Yeom, Sok, Kim et al. · Graduate School of Data Science·22 min·May 22, 2026
  3. 069
    When Smarter Models Forecast Worse: The Hidden Failure Mode in LLM Predictions
    Merrill, Lee, Karger · Forecasting Research Institute / UC Berkeley·30 min·May 22, 2026
  4. 061
    When Helpful Agents Go Sideways: A 404 Error, Campus Security, and Why Alignment Misses This
    Jha, Triedman, Bhattacharya et al. · Cornell University·27 min·May 20, 2026
  5. 060
    When Splitting One Model Across Three Agents Doubles Its Accuracy
    Lu, Fang, Zhong et al. · University of Georgia·26 min·May 20, 2026
  6. 053
    An AI Agent Swapped In Focal Loss And Beat A Human-Tuned Training Script
    Pepe, Lin, Magka et al. · FAIR at Meta·32 min·May 18, 2026
  7. 048
    How a 30B Open Model Reached Olympiad Gold With the Right Recipe
    Li, Zhan, Zhang et al. · Shanghai AI Laboratory / The Chinese University of Hong Kong·31 min·May 16, 2026
  8. 044
    How One Sentence and a Forged History Flip the Most Aligned Models
    Salgado · Independent Researcher·23 min·May 15, 2026
  9. 041
    When the Iteration Teaches the Model to Skip the Iteration
    Fein-Ashley, Rashidinejad · University of Southern California·30 min·May 13, 2026
  10. 040
    Two Frozen Models Learn to Whisper: Coupling Through Hidden States
    Flamant, Ghai, Shimizu · AWS Agentic AI·29 min·May 13, 2026
  11. 033
    Echo: The Paper Arguing You Never Needed a KV Cache for Retrieval
    Sridhar, Johansen · California·24 min·May 11, 2026
  12. 032
    A Sticky-Note for Every Layer: Letting Transformers Remember What They Were Just Thinking
    Aviss · Fifth Dimension·23 min·May 09, 2026
  13. 023
    Why a Small Agent Confidently Overwrites Memories It Doesn't Understand
    Mao, Zhao, Penn et al. · City University of Hong Kong·23 min·May 07, 2026

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