Ai2 to release open-source coding agent with 100x cheaper training
Tim Dettmers · The End of GPU Scaling? Compute & The Agent Era — Tim Dettmers (Ai2) & Dan Fu (Together AI) · Jan 22, 2026 · at 52:57
Tim Dettmers, Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), discusses upcoming research and model releases from his team on coding agents.
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“We will have a major release of an open source coding agent that has a couple of key features. For one, training is a hundred times cheaper. You need to generate synthetic data and you need to train on it. And so we have a method that's a hundred roughly a hundred times cheaper, but it still gets set of the art performance.”
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More from Tim Dettmers
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“The hardware is maxed out. We have no new technology. We can make it easier to manufacture and a little bit cheaper, but not faster. And we have maxed out on the additional features.”
Dettmers: Frontier AI performance will stagnate while smaller models improve
“Performance on the frontier will stagnate, but on the smaller level, we get more and more powerful models still, because you can distill from these large models into these small models.”
Dettmers: 4-bit precision is the end of quantization
“Four bit precision is the end of quantization.”
Dettmers: Coding agents serve as general-purpose AI agents for digital tasks
“Coding agents are general agents. Coding agents can write programs that solve other problems, and code is so general, if there's a digital problem, you could solve it for code, and coding agents make the thing so easy that now you can solve a variety of proble…”
Dettmers: Students using AI agents perform poorly on basic domain knowledge
“If we let people use agents, they perform very poorly on basic knowledge. And if we let people just do the basic knowledge, they don't know how to use agents and they can't compete. So they can't do useful work in the workforce nowadays.”