Slurm

Morgan Stanley's ALPHALAB: Multi-Agent Research Across Optimization Domains — Brendan Rappazzo

Jul 29, 2026 · 20:07

Morgan Stanley's Brendan Rappazzo presents AlphaLab, an open-source multi-agent system that automates quant research by having agents write code, set up backtests, and run experiments, arguing that the lasting human role is designing verifiable environments like a private Kaggle. The system uses a strategist agent that proposes experiments and worker agents that implement them, managed via a Kanban board, and skipped off-the-shelf frameworks to maintain control. Rappazzo reports real improvements found internally, including a top 12% finish in a Kaggle competition fine-tuning Nvidia's Nematron model. He emphasizes that the key is building good evals and environments, which encode enterprise expertise, and that the ultimate goal is a self-improving system where the auto research optimizes itself.

Dream Machine: Scaling to 1m users in 4 days — Keegan McCallum, Luma AI

Jul 19, 2025 · 19:03

Keegan McCallum, Head of ML Infrastructure at Luma AI, details how the company's Dream Machine model scaled from 500 to 9,000 H100 GPUs within hours to handle 1 million users in four days, outpacing ChatGPT's initial growth. He explains that their initial Triton inference server setup was brittle and ill-suited for multi-GPU, multi-node video models, prompting a re-architecture to a custom serving stack on vanilla PyTorch. To solve work starvation across user tiers, they implemented an SLO-based aging system that ranks jobs by the percentage of their worst-case wait time elapsed. For managing dozens of model versions, they store immutable full Python environments and checkpoints in object storage, with a YAML file controlling active deployments and enabling zero-downtime rollouts across thousands of GPUs. McCallum also discusses partnerships with Nvidia, AMD, and Grok, and how Luma's broader mission is to build general multimodal intelligence that generates, understands, and operates in the physical world.