Jason Wei: Wet-Lab Data Lets Specialized Models Beat GPT-6 Astra at Frontier Science

vwxyzjn · x · 2026-09-16

Jason Wei highlights a result where a specialized model trained on wet-lab data beat GPT-6 Astra on a frontier science task. His take: scaling still works, but the closer you get to the frontier of science, the more specialized data matters — giving task-specific models an edge since more parameters serve the target task, and such private data may be a real moat. The quoted khoomeik thread frames this as building a post-training data flywheel for science ("labs that learn"), analogous to what math and coding already had.

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