Data companies are becoming research labs, with verifier design the most climbable problem
madhavsinghal_ · x · 2026-10-09
The author recalls a core prediction made 10 months ago: all data companies will end up doing research as a core business, and the best ones are now sharing how.
- The best companies move beyond post-training Qwen 4Bs to demonstrate hillclimbability on real research problems.
- Research agenda: calibration on open-ended long-horizon tasks, simulators, automated verifier expansion and fuzzing, adversarial pipelines mining failure patterns, environment design for self-verification, and creative task-specific reward functions.
- Verifier design has the most headroom and is very hill-climbable when domain experts can encode objectives (e.g., autoformalization for software).
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