Nat Lambert: the next frontier research lab might be a data company
joecole · x · 2026-10-13
- Nathan Lambert: the data industry has taken off, but net output quality is far too low, amplifying reward hacking. Keeping the RL data pipeline going requires pushing the frontier of evaluation science and building benchmarks to hillclimb on areas of clear economic value. He's advising Mercor on this research direction and predicts major investment around frontier labs in open inference, open post-training, and data.
- Sai Rajeswar adds: the industry scaled volume for years; the bottleneck now is trustworthy data, which is why reward hacking keeps showing up. Verifier design has huge headroom — most RL environments grade with the checks that were easiest to write, not the ones that are actually right, and having models build better environments is barely explored.
- Takeaway: the next frontier research lab might be a data company.
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