Lisha Li

Lisha Li × Nathan Lambert

Lambert estimates distillation may give Chinese labs a few months, but its value in RL-heavy post-training remains unclear.Closed labs integrate inference and lead coding, where revenue has gone from zero to $100 billion, while open-model economics fragment builders, inference firms and post-training companies.Open models may still win buyers seeking owned weights and the cheapest adequate model.

Lisha Li × Mehtaab Sawhney × Mark Sellke

Astra determined the asymptotic Cohn–Elkies linear-programming bound for high-dimensional sphere packing, constructing an attaining function and proving no better function exists within the framework.Its edge is execution: correct bets, technical precision, and clean restarts produced a roughly 15-page non-sofic-group proof, while task-oriented stopping leaves supervision and long-horizon execution as risks to monitor.

Lisha Li × Daniel Litt

Litt’s favorite autonomous signal is the mid-May solution to the Irish unit-distance problem, whose classical 1960s techniques helped mathematicians find counterexamples elsewhere, including the sum-product conjecture over the real numbers.Models remain weak at theory-building and long-proof verification, while slot-machine papers risk mode collapse, making human-led research diversity and the accumulation of understanding important watchpoints as capabilities advance.