Today I attended a mini-hackathon via SDx. I attended to solo work on some arkaine agents and to be present as a mentor/advisory role for other attendees. It was a short 6 hour affair, mainly focused on playing with the new OpenAI o3-mini. It also helps to be inspired by seeing other people creatively applying AI to a quick weekend project.

I ended up building a great prototype of a research agent - the original goal of arkaine for myself. It needs some work - I definitely ran into rate limiting issues and need to get the agent to better understand report generation at the end. Expect this to get added in to arkaine soon. Pushing myself to finish the project in the time allotted was also a great exercise in rapid prototyping. As for the other projects - there were quite a few that wowed me. I’m certainly looking forward to the next time I can dive in and code surrounded by other makers.

#arkaine #AI #SDx

Here’s an ingenious set of hacks to cheaply modify the behavior of existing LLMs to reason better. Most notably was the detecting the initial use of the </think> tag and instead replacing it with a second-guessing term (best performing was “Wait”). This forced the model to think longer, which in turn improved performance on tasks significantly.

I’ll likely be doing a deeper dive for my upcoming paper club presentation.

#AI

We’re kicking off 2025’s paper club series via SDx again on February 18th @ 6:30 pm. I’ll be presenting DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning. Join in if you’re in the area and want to deep dive some of the recent cutting edge discoveries.

#AI #Meetup

I found myself looking into the effects of censorship removal from LLMs - particularly the recent popular kid on the block Deepseek R-1. It seems that the model becomes uncooperative against certain topics that don’t align with party doctrine. I came a cross a generic refusals removal repository linked here which made me chuckle - it’s just control vectors fine tuned into the model, which I discussed here.

#AI

I recently gave (an unfortunately rushed) talk about arkaine - a maker-focused agentic AI framework I’ve been spending most of my time building. Slides for the talk are here

#AI