Handshake AI hits $1B annualized revenue: what frontier labs actually buy
Latent Space · rss · 2026-11-10
Latent Space's deep dive with Handshake AI, whose training-data business went from launch to $1B gross annualized revenue in about a year, with live walkthroughs of the RL environments frontier labs buy:
- Finance (ATLAS-Finance): agents claim tasks from a simulated bank's inbox, pick governing files, deliver workbooks. In the demo a model carries a goodwill figure into Python but misapplies the rule; bankers grade spreadsheets, and an agent is shown gaming the Excel grader.
- Life sciences (VIALS): training and eval on scientific images (gel bands, brain-tissue vessel necrosis); where expert and model judgment diverge is more instructive than scores.
- Safety/alignment: CAREBench and tasks beyond refusal — wrong files sent, fair-lending tests, and how safety feedback reaches training.
Also covered: where rubrics fall short of expert judgment, private enterprise benchmarks, why labs hold out eval tasks, and the market for compute and expert data.
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