95% of model building reduces to improving data or improving compute efficiency — it's not magic, and many more people could be capable researchers.

Eiso demystifies foundation model work: most of the job is looking at data, writing good code, and running experiments. He cites an example of an engineer who became a legitimate RL researcher in six months because the Model Factory lowered the experimentation barrier. ✦ AI generated

Eiso Kant · Latent Space · 2026-07-23 · original ↗

I think you can sum down 95% of model building to just doing two things. You're improving data or you're improving compute efficiency... A lot of the work that all of us are doing on a day is not sitting down trying to solve a math theorem. A lot of the work that we're doing is just really doing the basics right, writing good code, looking at data, improving it, running experiments.

verbatim transcript · starts at 33:10