A Technical History of Generative Media

Lance: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lance-martin-64a33b5/ How Context Fails: https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/06/22/how-contexts-fail-and-how-to-fix-them.html How New Buzzwords Get Created: https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/07/24/why-the-term-context-engineering-matters.html Content Engineering: https://x.com/RLanceMartin/status/1948441848978309358 https://rlancemartin.github.io/2025/06/23/context_engineering/ https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16aaXLu40GugY-kOpqDU4e-S0hD1FmHcNyF0rRRnb1OU/edit?usp=sharing Manus Post: https://manus.im/blog/Context-Engineering-for-AI-Agents-Lessons-from-Building-Manus Cognition Post: https://cognition.ai/blog/dont-build-multi-agents Multi-Agent Researcher: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/multi-agent-research-system Human-in-the-loop + Memory: https://github.com/langchain-ai/agents-from-scratch - Bitter Lesson in AI Engineering - Hyung Won Chung on the Bitter Lesson in AI Research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orDKvo8h71o Bitter Lesson w/ Claude Code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lue8K2jqfKk&t=1s Learning the Bitter Lesson in AI Engineering: https://rlancemartin.github.io/2025/07/30/bitter_lesson/ Open Deep Research: https://github.com/langchain-ai/open_deep_research https://academy.langchain.com/courses/deep-research-with-langgraph Scaling and building things that "don't yet work": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Jx4qvDoSo - Frameworks - Roast framework at Shopify / standardization of orchestration tools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NHCyq8bBcM MCP adoption within Anthropic / standardization of protocols: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlEQ6Y3WNNI How to think about frameworks: https://blog.langchain.com/how-to-think-about-agent-frameworks/ RAG benchmarking: https://rlancemartin.github.io/2025/04/03/vibe-code/ Simon's talk with memory-gone-wrong: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/6/six-months-in-llms/

Today we are joined by Gorkem and Batuhan from Fal.ai, the fastest growing generative media inference provider. They recently raised a $125M Series C and crossed $100M ARR. We covered how they pivoted from dbt pipelines to diffusion models inference, what were the models that really changed the trajectory of image generation, and the future of AI videos. Enjoy! 00:00 - Introductions 04:58 - History of Major AI Models and Their Impact on Fal.ai 07:06 - Pivoting to Generative Media and Strategic Business Decisions 10:46 - Technical discussion on CUDA optimization and kernel development 12:42 - Inference Engine Architecture and Kernel Reusability 14:59 - Performance Gains and Latency Trade-offs 15:50 - Discussion of model latency importance and performance optimization 17:56 - Importance of Latency and User Engagement 18:46 - Impact of Open Source Model Releases and Competitive Advantage 19:00 - Partnerships with closed source model developers 20:06 - Collaborations with Closed-Source Model Providers 21:28 - Serving Audio Models and Infrastructure Scalability 22:29 - Serverless GPU infrastructure and technical stack 23:52 - GPU Prioritization: H100s and Blackwell Optimization 25:00 - Discussion on ASICs vs. General Purpose GPUs 26:10 - Architectural Trends: MMDiTs and Model Innovation 27:35 - Rise and Decline of Distillation and Consistency Models 28:15 - Draft Mode and Streaming in Image Generation Workflows 29:46 - Generative Video Models and the Role of Latency 30:14 - Auto-Regressive Image Models and Industry Reactions 31:35 - Discussion of OpenAI's Sora and competition in video generation 34:44 - World Models and Creative Applications in Games and Movies 35:27 - Video Models’ Revenue Share and Open-Source Contributions 36:40 - Rise of Chinese Labs and Partnerships 38:03 - Top Trending Models on Hugging Face and ByteDance's Role 39:29 - Monetization Strategies for Open Models 40:48 - Usage Distribution and Model Turnover on FAL 42:11 - Revenue Share vs. Open Model Usage Optimization 42:47 - Moderation and NSFW Content on the Platform 44:03 - Advertising as a key use case for generative media 45:37 - Generative Video in Startup Marketing and Virality 46:56 - LoRA Usage and Fine-Tuning Popularity 47:17 - LoRA ecosystem and fine-tuning discussion 49:25 - Post-Training of Video Models and Future of Fine-Tuning 50:21 - ComfyUI Pipelines and Workflow Complexity 52:31 - Requests for startups and future opportunities in the space 53:33 - Data Collection and RedPajama-Style Initiatives for Media Models 53:46 - RL for Image and Video Models: Unknown Potential 55:11 - Requests for Models: Editing and Conversational Video Models 57:12 - VO3 Capabilities: Lip Sync, TTS, and Timing 58:23 - Bitter Lesson and the Future of Model Workflows 58:44 - FAL's hiring approach and team structure 59:29 - Team Structure and Scaling Applied ML and Performance Teams 1:01:41 - Developer Experience Tools and Low-Code/No-Code Integration 1:03:04 - Improving Hiring Process with Public Challenges and Benchmarks 1:04:02 - Closing Remarks and Culture at FAL

Our chat with Ari shows that data curation is the most impactful and underinvested area in AI. He argues that the prevailing focus on model architecture and compute scaling overlooks the "bitter lesson" that "models are what they eat." Effective data curation—a sophisticated process involving filtering, rebalancing, sequencing (curriculum), and synthetic data generation—allows for training models that are simultaneously faster, better, and smaller. Morcos recounts his personal journey from focusing on model-centric inductive biases to realizing that data quality is the primary lever for breaking the diminishing returns of naive scaling laws. Datology's mission is to automate this complex curation process, making state-of-the-art data accessible to any organization and enabling a new paradigm of AI development where data efficiency, not just raw scale, drives progress. Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 00:46 What is Datology? The mission to train models faster, better, and smaller through data curation. 01:59 Ari's background: From neuroscience to realizing the "Bitter Lesson" of AI. 05:30 Key Insight: Inductive biases from architecture become less important and even harmful as data scale increases. 08:08 Thesis: Data is the most underinvested area of AI research relative to its impact. 10:15 Why data work is culturally undervalued in research and industry. 12:19 How self-supervised learning changed everything, moving from a data-scarce to a data-abundant regime. 17:05 Why automated curation is superior to human-in-the-loop, citing the DCLM study. 19:22 The "Elephants vs. Dogs" analogy for managing data redundancy and complexity. 22:46 A brief history and commentary on key datasets (Common Crawl, GitHub, Books3). 26:24 Breaking naive scaling laws by improving data quality to maintain high marginal information gain. 29:07 Datology's demonstrated impact: Achieving baseline performance 12x faster. 34:19 The business of data: Datology's moat and its relationship with open-source datasets. 39:12 Synthetic Data Explain ed: The difference between risky "net-new" creation and powerful "rephrasing." 49:02 The Resurgence of Curriculum Learning: Why ordering data matters in the underfitting regime. 52:55 The Future of Training: Optimizing pre-training data to make post-training more effective. 54:49 Who is training their own models and why (Sovereign AI, large enterprises). 57:24 "Train Smaller": Why inference cost makes smaller, specialized models the ultimate goal for enterprises. 01:00:19 The problem with model pruning and why data-side solutions are complementary. 01:03:03 On finding the smallest possible model for a given capability. 01:06:49 Key learnings from the RC foundation model collaboration, proving that data curation "stacks." 01:09:46 Lightning Round: What data everyone wants & who should work at Datology. 01:14:24 Commentary on Meta's superintelligence efforts and Yann LeCun's role.

Jeff Huber of Chroma joins us to talk about what actually matters in vector databases in 2025, why “modern search for AI” is different, and how to ship systems that don’t rot as context grows. Full show notes: https://www.latent.space/p/chroma 00:00 Introductions 00:48 Why Build Chroma 02:55 Information Retrieval vs. Search 04:29 Staying Focused in a Competitive AI Market 08:08 Building Chroma Cloud 12:15 Context Engineering and the Problems with RAG 16:11 Context Rot 21:49 Prioritizing Context Quality 27:02 Code Indexing and Retrieval Strategies 32:04 Chunk Rewriting and Query Optimization for Code 34:07 Transformer Architecture Evolution and Retrieval Systems 38:06 Memory as a Benefit of Context Engineering 40:13 Structuring AI Memory and Offline Compaction 45:46 Lessons from Previous Startups and Building with Purpose 47:32 Religion and Values in Silicon Valley 50:18 Company Culture, Design, and Brand Consistency 52:36 Hiring at Chroma: Designers, Researchers, and Engineers

Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, joins us to talk about GPT-5 and GPT-OSS, the future of software engineering, why reinforcement learning is still scaling, and how OpenAI is planning to get to AGI. 00:00 Introductions 01:04 The Evolution of Reasoning at OpenAI 04:01 Online vs Offline Learning in Language Models 06:44 Sample Efficiency and Human Curation in Reinforcement Learning 08:16 Scaling Compute and Supercritical Learning 13:21 Wall clock time limitations in RL and real-world interactions 16:34 Experience with ARC Institute and DNA neural networks 19:33 Defining the GPT-5 Era 22:46 Evaluating Model Intelligence and Task Difficulty 25:06 Practical Advice for Developers Using GPT-5 31:48 Model Specs 37:21 Challenges in RL Preferences (e.g., try/catch) 39:13 Model Routing and Hybrid Architectures in GPT-5 43:58 GPT-5 pricing and compute efficiency improvements 46:04 Self-Improving Coding Agents and Tool Usage 49:11 On-Device Models and Local vs Remote Agent Systems 51:34 Engineering at OpenAI and Leveraging LLMs 54:16 Structuring Codebases and Teams for AI Optimization 55:27 The Value of Engineers in the Age of AGI 58:42 Current state of AI research and lab diversity 01:01:11 OpenAI’s Prioritization and Focus Areas 01:03:05 Advice for Founders: It's Not Too Late 01:04:20 Future outlook and closing thoughts 01:04:33 Time Capsule to 2045: Future of Compute and Abundance 01:07:07 Time Capsule to 2005: More Problems Will Emerge

Chapters 00:00:00 Welcome and Guest Introduction 00:01:18 Tulu, OVR, and the RLVR Journey 00:03:40 Industry Approaches to Post-Training and Preference Data 00:06:08 Understanding RLVR and Its Impact 00:06:18 Agents, Tool Use, and Training Environments 00:10:34 Open Data, Human Feedback, and Benchmarking 00:12:44 Chatbot Arena, Sycophancy, and Evaluation Platforms 00:15:42 RLHF vs RLVR: Books, Algorithms, and Future Directions 00:17:54 Frontier Models: Reasoning, Hybrid Models, and Data 00:22:11 Search, Retrieval, and Emerging Model Capabilities 00:29:23 Tool Use, Curriculum, and Model Training Challenges 00:38:06 Skills, Planning, and Abstraction in Agent Models 00:46:50 Parallelism, Verifiers, and Scaling Approaches 00:54:33 Overoptimization and Reward Design in RL 01:02:27 Open Models, Personalization, and the Model Spec 01:06:50 Open Model Ecosystem and Infrastructure 01:13:05 Meta, Hardware, and the Future of AI Competition 01:15:42 Building an Open DeepSeek and Closing Thoughts We first had Nathan on to give us his RLHF deep dive when he was joining AI2, and now he’s back to help us catch up on the evolution to RLVR (Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards), first proposed in his Tulu 3 paper. While RLHF remains foundational, RLVR has emerged as a powerful approach for training models on tasks with clear success criteria and using verifiable, objective functions as reward signals—particularly useful in domains like math, code correctness, and instruction-following. Instead of relying solely on subjective human feedback, RLVR leverages deterministic signals to guide optimization, making it more scalable and potentially more reliable across many domains. However, he notes that RLVR is still rapidly evolving, especially regarding how it handles tool use and multi-step reasoning. We also discussed the Tulu model series, a family of instruction-tuned open models developed at AI2. Tulu is designed to be a reproducible, state-of-the-art post-training recipe for the open community. Unlike frontier labs like OpenAI or Anthropic, which rely on vast and often proprietary datasets, Tulu aims to distill and democratize best practices for instruction and preference tuning. We are impressed with how small eval suites, careful task selection, and transparent methodology can rival even the best proprietary models on specific benchmarks. One of the most fascinating threads is the challenge of incorporating tool use into RL frameworks. Lambert highlights that while you can prompt a model to use tools like search or code execution, getting the model to reliably learn when and how to use them through RL is much harder. This is compounded by the difficulty of designing reward functions that avoid overoptimization—where models learn to “game” the reward signal rather than solve the underlying task. This is particularly problematic in code generation, where models might reward hack unit tests by inserting pass statements instead of correct logic. As models become more agentic and are expected to plan, retrieve, and act across multiple tools, reward design becomes a critical bottleneck. Other topics covered: - The evolution from RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) to RLVR (Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards) - The goals and technical architecture of the Tulu models, including the motivation to open-source post-training recipes - Challenges of tool use in RL: verifiability, reward design, and scaling across domains - Evaluation frameworks and the role of platforms like Chatbot Arena and emerging “arena”-style benchmarks - The strategic tension between hybrid reasoning models and unified reasoning models at the frontier - Planning, abstraction, and calibration in reasoning agents and why these concepts matter - The future of open-source AI models, including DeepSeek, OLMo, and the potential for an “American DeepSeek” - The importance of model personality, character tuning, and the model spec paradigm - Overoptimization in RL settings and how it manifests in different domains (control tasks, code, math) - Industry trends in inference-time scaling and model parallelism Finally, the episode closes with a vision for the future of open-source AI. Nathan has now written up his ambition to build an “American DeepSeek”—a fully open, end-to-end reasoning-capable model with transparent training data, tools, and infrastructure. He emphasizes that open-source AI is not just about weights; it’s about releasing recipes, evaluations, and methods that lower the barrier for everyone to build and understand cutting-edge systems. It would seem the

This is a recap episode that ends with a short fresh interview on the future of Windsurf + Cognition with Jeff Wang and Scott Wu at the end. As the story of Windsurf as an independent company has come to a dramatic close with Google and Cognition, we’re taking this opportunity to look back at our coverage of Windsurf over the last 3 years. Here’s a brief timeline with related links. Jun 2021 - Exafunction founded Oct 2022 - Codeium pivot https://windsurf.com/blog/beta-launch-announcement Dec 2022 - “Copilot for X” https://www.latent.space/p/what-building-copilot-for-x-really Mar 2023 - Codeium first episode, LS episode 2 https://www.latent.space/p/varun-mohan July 2023 - “How to Make AI UX Your Moat" ****https://www.latent.space/p/ai-ux-moat Mar 2024 - Cognition Devin launch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjHtjT7GO1c Jun 2024 - Scott @ AI Engineer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7NWjoD_OuY Jun 2024 - Kevin @ AI Engineer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuZXbinJ4Uc Nov 2024 - “Enterprise Infra Native” https://www.latent.space/p/enterprise Nov 2024 - Windsurf launch, LS Episode https://www.latent.space/p/windsurf Mar 2025 - Kevin Hou @ AI Engineer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVNNvWq6dKo Jun 2025 - Scott @ AI Engineer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI83buT_23o Jun 2025 - Kevin Hou @ AI Engineer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVuNPL5QO8Q Jul 2025 - Jeff + Scott, CogSurf Episode ← new one, released here. We hope this serves as food for thought for students of history, and a reintroduction to the Latent Space extended universe and backlog, for those of you who are new. Welcome! Timestamps [00:02:07] Mar 2024 Codeium @ LS [00:52:36] Mar 2024 Devin Launch Video [00:54:28] Jun 2024 Codeium @ AIE SF [01:12:14] Jun 2024 Cognition @ AIE SF [01:30:53] Nov 2024 Windsurf Launch Video [01:37:16] Nov 2024 Windsurf Launch @ LS [02:43:10] Feb 2025 Windsurf @ AIE NYC [03:03:27] Jun 2025 Cognition @ AIE SF [03:18:50] June 2025 Windsurf @ AIE SF [03:34:23] July 2025 - Cognition + Windsurf Chapters 00:00:00 Mar 2024 Codeium @ LS 00:52:36 Mar 2024 Devin Launch Video 00:54:28 Jun 2024 Codeium @ AIE SF 01:12:14 Jun 2024 Cognition @ AIE SF 01:30:53 Nov 2024 Windsurf Launch Video 01:37:16 Nov 2024 Windsurf Launch @ LS 02:43:10 Feb 2025 Windsurf @ AIE NYC 03:03:27 Jun 2025 Cognition @ AIE SF 03:18:50 June 2025 Windsurf @ AIE SF 03:34:23 July 2025 - Cognition + Windsurf

ChatGPT handles 2.5B prompts/day and is on track to match Google's daily searches by end of 2026. AI agents don't browse like us—they crave queryable, chunkable data for tools like ChatGPT & Perplexity. A new industry is being born, some are calling it AI SEO, others GEO, but what is clear is that it drives amazing results. Businesses are seeing 2-4x higher conversion from visitors coming from AI compared to traditional search. Robert McCloy is the co-founder of Scrunch AI (https://scrunchai.com/), a fast growing company that helps brands and businesses re-write their content on the fly based on what agents are looking for.

Akshay Agrawal joins us to talk about Marimo and their vision for the future of Python notebooks, and how it’s the perfect canvas for AI-driven data analysis. 0:00 Introduction 0:46 Overview of Marimo and Its Features 2:33 Origin Story and Motivation Behind Marimo 4:26 Demo: Classical Machine Learning with MNIST in Marimo 6:52 Notebook Compatibility and Conversion from Jupyter 7:42 Demo: Interactive Notebook with Custom UI and Layout 10:08 AI-Native Utilities and Code Generation with Language Models 11:36 Dependency Management and Integration with UV Package Manager 13:00 Demo: Data Annotation Workflow Using a PS5 Controller 15:51 Starting from Scratch: Blank Canvas AI Use Cases 18:27 Context Formatting for AI Code Generation 19:54 Chat Interface and Local/Remote Model Support 21:01 WebAssembly Support and MoLab Cloud-Hosted Notebooks 23:21 Future Plans and Breaking Out of Old Notebook Habits 25:40 Running Marimo Notebooks as Scripts or Data Apps 26:44 Exploring AI Agents and Community Contributions 26:56 Call to Action: How to Get Started and Contribute

Saoud Rizwan and Pash from Cline joined us to talk about why fast apply models got bitter lesson'd, how they pioneered the plan + act paradigm for coding, and why non-technical people use IDEs to do marketing and generate slides. Full writeup: https://www.latent.space/p/cline X: https://x.com/latentspacepod Chapters: 00:00 - Introductions 01:35 - Plan and Act Paradigm 05:37 - Model Evaluation and Early Development of Cline 08:14 - Use Cases of Cline Beyond Coding 09:09 - Why Cline is a VS Code Extension and Not a Fork 12:07 - Economic Value of Programming Agents 16:07 - Early Adoption for MCPs 19:35 - Local vs Remote MCP Servers 22:10 - Anthropic's Role in MCP Registry 22:49 - Most Popular MCPs and Their Use Cases 25:26 - Challenges and Future of MCP Monetization 27:32 - Security and Trust Issues with MCPs 28:56 - Alternative History Without MCP 29:43 - Market Positioning of Coding Agents and IDE Integration Matrix 32:57 - Visibility and Autonomy in Coding Agents 35:21 - Evolving Definition of Complexity in Programming Tasks 38:16 - Forks of Cline and Open Source Regrets 40:07 - Simplicity vs Complexity in Agent Design 46:33 - How Fast Apply Got Bitter Lesson'd 49:12 - Cline's Business Model and Bring-Your-Own-API-Key Approach 54:18 - Integration with OpenRouter and Enterprise Infrastructure 55:32 - Impact of Declining Model Costs 57:48 - Background Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 1:00:42 - Vision and Multi-Modalities 1:01:07 - State of Context Engineering 1:07:37 - Memory Systems in Coding Agents 1:10:14 - Standardizing Rules Files Across Agent Tools 1:11:16 - Cline's Personality and Anthropomorphization 1:12:55 - Hiring at Cline and Team Culture