Silas Alberti of Cognition discusses the emerging platform shift where foundation model providers offer reinforcement learning fine-tuning tools to enterprise developers.
Insight
Alberti: Small numbers of manually curated evals beat large eval sets
“I think usually like small numbers of very high quality evals are the way to go and like we curate them manually and make sure they're really good.”
Insight
Alberti: Wiki pages are a better abstraction than pure RAG for codebase search
“If you just do like pure, like rack on like such a big base code files, it'll just be like pretty bad at a certain point, you know, on a single code base. Sure. I can see it, but Tens of thousands of code bases. It's tougher. But I think actually the wiki page…”
Insight
Alberti: Multi-Turn RL Enables Aggressive Code Optimization Over Single-Turn Models
“Basically the single-turn model that was just trained on, like, getting the best result after one turn. It would basically be a little bit, like, too careful, because it couldn't risk writing, like, non-compiling code, whereas, like, the multi-turn model would…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Alberti: DeepWiki compute spend may break $1M soon
“So we think we should be now at like the high, like tens of thousands of repos. So I guess you can like do the rough map. Like we might be approaching quite significant numbers of compute spend here. I mean maybe we'll like break the million soon.”
Insight
Alberti: Folder structure graphs are poor representations of codebase architecture
“There are some, the simplest one is a folder structure graph, but unfortunately, it's, like, actually a pretty bad one because people sometimes just, you know, like, put all the components in this folder and all the servers in this folder.”
Disclosure
Alberti: Cognition built its own in-house vector database
“This culture of like building everything in-house. It's also kind of funny, like we, there's like a rack component to this. And I've been actually, I personally advocate, I can just like use a vector database and make life easy. But then there's a really stron…”