Adaption Labs: Gradient-Free Continual Learning — Sara Hooker, Adaption
Aug 12, 2026 · 20:51
Sara Hooker of Adaption Labs argues that the frontier of AI discovery is about to widen, moving beyond the 'unreasonably narrow path' of elite PhDs and industry labs. She introduces AutoScientist, which automates model training by co-optimizing data and model, outperforming research staff and achieving win rates above 60% (a budget cap since removed). Hooker also presents the 'slow death of scaling,' claiming pretraining size is no longer the most lucrative axis, as smaller models now outperform larger ones on the OpenLLM leaderboard. This shift makes compute more distributable, enabling more people to contribute to frontier AI. She addresses safety concerns, distillation dependencies, and offers free GPU access to AutoScientist beta users.
