Real Alpha

a16z Podcast · 5 min instead of 59 min · Oct 14, 2026

Frontier gains outside math and code come from buying data

Nathan Lambert

Co-founder & executive director, Trillium Labs

Led post-training for Ai2's open Olmo and Tülu models, wrote the RLHF Book and writes the Interconnects newsletter.

  • Erik TorenbergHost · General partner, Andreessen Horowitz

    Helped build Product Hunt; founded On Deck, Village Global and Turpentine.

About this segment

Lambert argues that progress in hard-to-verify domains comes from purchased data and RL environments, not magic generalization. He also says rushed environment vendors are a source of reward hacking.

From “Can Open Models Keep Up With OpenAI and Anthropic? | Nathan Lambert”, Oct 14, 2026. Watch the full episode

“but fundamentally, like AI progress is about data and about writing better software to serve your models.”
Nathan Lambertat 27:00 · a16z Podcast27:00

Takeaways

  1. Labs buy environments in bulk, then keep what works, so hit rates are well below 100%
  2. Price halving every eight months means about 1% of today's cost within four years
  3. Corner-cutting RL environment vendors help cause reward hacking in models
Watch 4:40 from 24:51

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 8:53Why distillation explains less of China's AI progress than assumed4:44

  2. 24:51Frontier gains outside math and code come from buying data4:40

  3. 54:55Scaling laws argue against a fast takeoff, but cyber risk is real3:41Up next