1,300 H200s + automated labs: Fedus's Neon model beats GPT-6 Astra on materials benchmark
giffmana · x · 2026-09-16
Liam Fedus (ex-OpenAI post-training lead) revealed his team built high-throughput materials labs in Menlo Park creating a loop between experiments and models: labs generate fresh data, models learn from it, then decide what to try next.
Using only 1,300 H200s plus months of proprietary experimental data for mid-training and RL, the resulting open-source model Neon surpasses GPT-6 Astra on their analysis benchmark — a showcase of small compute plus a tight experiment-data loop beating much larger models.
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