The Lore of 20yo ML Researcher at Prime Intellect | RL, Agents and Intelligence | Kalomaze, Prime Intellect

from GroundZero AI Talks · host Himanshu Dubey

Kalomaze is 20 yo Researcher at Prime IntellectTIMESTAMPS00:00:00 - Teaser00:01:06 - Intro00:01:49 - Organic Influence00:02:46 - “Extremely Silly Jester”00:04:04 - School Days & Diving into ML Research00:09:27 - Developing “Research Taste” & The Art of Selection00:11:45 - Dropping College, Parents’ Reaction & The Plan Ahead00:18:13 - How a Reddit Post Led to a Job at Shopify00:23:53 - Why He Chose Prime Intellect Over Other Offers00:29:27 - A Day in the Life: Workload at PI00:31:53 - Verifiers, GRPO & Semi-Verifiable Rewards00:40:02 - Progress on Synthesizers00:43:28 - The Environment Hub: A Hugging Face for RL?00:47:47 - How Research Ideas Emerge00:51:38 - Defining “Taste” in Research00:54:15 - The Future of Supervised Fine-Tuning01:01:48 - The Flaw in “Pure Reasoner” Models & Thoughts on GPT-OSS01:05:34 - Perspective on the Chinese Open-Source AI Surge01:07:58 - The Art of Training a Good RL Model01:10:08 - How to Learn a New Field: A Hacker’s Approach01:12:33 - Handling Disagreements with Experienced Researchers01:14:49 - Recipe for RLHF01:19:47 - Scaling Bigger Models vs. Designing Better Rewards01:26:31 - Rethinking Progress & The Post-AGI Narrative01:29:27 - The Most Unexpected Part of Working at Prime Intellect01:30:09 - Trivia Round Begins01:30:25 - Code Reviews from Will?01:33:43 - A Hidden Secret About Will01:34:26 - The Underrated Mindset That Gives Him an Edge01:36:18 - Take on AI Tech Twitter / TPOT01:38:16 - How Kalomaze Shaped Up + Advice01:41:17 - Podcast Wrap-Up

Episode metadata supplied by the publisher feed · Published May 16, 2026

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The Lore of 20yo ML Researcher at Prime Intellect | RL, Agents and Intelligence | Kalomaze, Prime Intellect

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