Solo researcher pretrains coding model in 3.5 months for <$10M, but skeptics call it an ad for Codex and Claude
s_tworkowski · x · 2026-10-22
Startup Mirendil unveiled Mirendil-Base, its first pretrained coding model, built by a single researcher in about 3.5 months with under $10M of compute including all research and the final run — pitching it as proof you can pretrain a competitive foundation model without a pretraining team.
Responding to the announcement, reiinakano was skeptical: the release reads more like an ad for Codex/Claude than for Mirendil itself, since a coding model built this way presumably leans on those very AI coding tools to develop and validate.
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