founder @astriolabs, prev @oracle, @alibabagroup
San Francisco, CA
Joined October 2025
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Nolan retweeted
flying to sf from montreal for this
who wants to meetup? coffee on me
We just sent out the last batch of invites for Vibecheck (fmxai.org/vibecheck). We're now at capacity (for the building, for two floors). The event is going to slap and I'm really, really excited about it!
- HUGE thanks to our sponsors, including @datadoghq , @theoremlabs , @omni, @workersio , @SafeWithAtlas, @astriolabs, For-All R&D (@qd_forall), and @thegp. This would be totally impossible without you!
- I'm also really stoked about several companies that are providing compute and platform tokens for competitors, including: @anthropicai, @PrimeIntellect, party.build, @lanyon_ai , @wearerandomlabs .
- And finally, we have some amazing experts who've helped plan the event and/or will be in attendance helping to run the event and judge entries, including folks from several of the above-mentioned companies, and from several academic labs, as well as from @mathematics_inc , @axiommathai , and @HarmonicMath .
I'll be sending rejection emails for anyone who didn't make it in shortly, and will close down the application form. If any currently RSVPd people cancel, we will send some last-minute invites accordingly. If you wanted to participate in this event but didn't make it in, please note two things: first, this does not reflect poorly on you -- we specifically aimed to accept people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just a bunch of our friends or of FM experts. And second, we are going to run more of these events! We are loosely planning to run a London event, colocated with FMxAI London in 2027 (and co-organized with @galois, see fmxai.org for more ..); a NYC event, at some TBD date; potentially also an online/remote one; and a defense-oriented event co-organized with @mathematics_inc. If you're interested in one of these let me know.
This event is absolutely a labor of love, and we hope you'll follow along. We'll be posting updates, repos, podcast episodes, video interviews, and more throughout, and it's going to be a lot of fun. Also, if you didn't make it in but want to experiment in your free time, we will be posting all the rules and judging criteria in the coming weeks on fmxai.org/vibecheck, and we encourage you to play around and post your work!
And for those of you who got in, see you in SF!!
Nolan retweeted
I am working on a map of the secure program synthesis space, in collaboration with @sergeybratus for our NDIST keynote on Tuesday. Here's a sneak-peak. The words "RISC-V" and "Lean" are used here WLOG, and some simplifications are made to fit everything on one page. Did I miss anything?
1. Develop semantics for each language in an interactive theorem prover, and then use these semantics to prove that every program is correct. (@oath_tech has done some work along these lines. See in particular Sam Xifaras' project on Ruby samx.io/blog/topics/devlog/2…)
2. Develop semantics for an architecture, say RISC-V, or perhaps for all possible architectures, and then use this to prove that every compiled program is correct. (@AnthropicAI made headlines recently with their announcement of a very large-scale project along these lines in collaboration with @theoremlabs anthropic.com/research/forma…)
3. Develop semantics for an architecture, say RISC-V, or perhaps for all possible architectures, and then use this to capture a formal model of each existing compiler or interpreter, and then iteratively (provably) refine each such model to an interpretable and easy-to-use formal semantics; then continue as in approach 1. (See foundational work by @kirancodes at BASIS AI basis.ai/blog/ship-your-inte…)
4. Make Lean, or some other such ITP + programming language, fast to run (comparable to Rust or C), and then completely rewrite all software in it, and prove the rewrites are correct. (This is I think, loosely speaking, the idea behind @VictorTaelin 's Bend.)
5. Make implementation-level verification tools, such as Verus, more capable and ergonomic, and then use them to prove all software correct. (This is what @fhuszar and @Craig_Hughes_ are doing at Reasonable, & I'm aware that BASIS and AWS are also working on this.)
6. Design a language in which unsafe states are illegal, and then rewrite everything in that language. Here, what kinds of safety you can express will be much more limited but the problem is, conversely, way more tractable. (This is what @danwallach and @DARPA did with TRACTOR, where the safety property is memory safety.)
Nolan retweeted
Announcing three major scientific discoveries, one each in mathematics (harmonic analysis), computer science (complexity theory), and physics (quantum field theory).
AI starting to help us improve our understanding of the universe! openai.com/index/building-sc…
Nolan retweeted
I suspect that this might just be a post-training RL artifact left over in the model. But we for sure need better honeypot evals for open source models to better understand potential backdoors or accidental risks like this one.
While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected.
Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions.
Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent.
But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models?
We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem.
Read the full report: cohere.com/blog/concerning-b…
interesting. could be a problem with narrow RL training with their internal data? this sounds a bit exaggerated to me. if the article is true, its saying chinese models are secretly sending data back to beijing
While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected.
Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions.
Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent.
But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models?
We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem.
Read the full report: cohere.com/blog/concerning-b…
i’m so glad that we could bring more hackers and engineers to do hands-on FM projects at Vibecheck. i can’t wait to see what projects they will be working on this coming weekend!
huge thanks to all our co-organizers and sponsors!
We just sent out the last batch of invites for Vibecheck (fmxai.org/vibecheck). We're now at capacity (for the building, for two floors). The event is going to slap and I'm really, really excited about it!
- HUGE thanks to our sponsors, including @datadoghq , @theoremlabs , @omni, @workersio , @SafeWithAtlas, @astriolabs, For-All R&D (@qd_forall), and @thegp. This would be totally impossible without you!
- I'm also really stoked about several companies that are providing compute and platform tokens for competitors, including: @anthropicai, @PrimeIntellect, party.build, @lanyon_ai , @wearerandomlabs .
- And finally, we have some amazing experts who've helped plan the event and/or will be in attendance helping to run the event and judge entries, including folks from several of the above-mentioned companies, and from several academic labs, as well as from @mathematics_inc , @axiommathai , and @HarmonicMath .
I'll be sending rejection emails for anyone who didn't make it in shortly, and will close down the application form. If any currently RSVPd people cancel, we will send some last-minute invites accordingly. If you wanted to participate in this event but didn't make it in, please note two things: first, this does not reflect poorly on you -- we specifically aimed to accept people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just a bunch of our friends or of FM experts. And second, we are going to run more of these events! We are loosely planning to run a London event, colocated with FMxAI London in 2027 (and co-organized with @galois, see fmxai.org for more ..); a NYC event, at some TBD date; potentially also an online/remote one; and a defense-oriented event co-organized with @mathematics_inc. If you're interested in one of these let me know.
This event is absolutely a labor of love, and we hope you'll follow along. We'll be posting updates, repos, podcast episodes, video interviews, and more throughout, and it's going to be a lot of fun. Also, if you didn't make it in but want to experiment in your free time, we will be posting all the rules and judging criteria in the coming weeks on fmxai.org/vibecheck, and we encourage you to play around and post your work!
And for those of you who got in, see you in SF!!
got a chance to see a demo last week. they are def cooking sth
Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10.
Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years.
Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.
Nolan retweeted
These are interesting times, we see agents hacking stuff and at the same time formally verifying oss software.
We are hosting a formal methods hackathon along with some of the best folks in this space including @theoremlabs
I’m super excited about all the things people are going to “vibecheck” at the event.
New on our Frontier Red Team blog: using Claude to formally verify software at large scale.
Formal verification can prove that code is free of certain bugs, but historically it has only been feasible for small codebases (or required a lot of expert time).
With AI models, however, this is beginning to change. In collaboration with @theoremlabs, we used Claude to prove security properties in over one hundred real-world open-source libraries over the span of a few weeks.
Read our research in full here: anthropic.com/research/forma…
great job by theorem
New on our Frontier Red Team blog: using Claude to formally verify software at large scale.
Formal verification can prove that code is free of certain bugs, but historically it has only been feasible for small codebases (or required a lot of expert time).
With AI models, however, this is beginning to change. In collaboration with @theoremlabs, we used Claude to prove security properties in over one hundred real-world open-source libraries over the span of a few weeks.
Read our research in full here: anthropic.com/research/forma…
Nolan retweeted
Introducing ∀ Forall-Lean-Agent
A framework for auditable reasoning in formal mathematics and software verification.
- 672/672 PutnamBench
- 100/100 VeriSoftBench subset
- 2/2 lean-eval software-verification tasks
Here's how it works.🧵
Read more: astriolabs.com/index/forall-…
Nolan retweeted
We’re releasing a broad range of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model.
We’ve been consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study, and we have drawn on their advice and public recommendations to inform how we release these results.
github.com/openai/math
happy to share Forall-Lean-Agent, a project I led at @AstrioLabs, accepted to the @NeurIPSConf 2026 VeriCodeGen workshop.
thank you to the advisors, benchmark maintainers, reviewers and everyone who helped shape this work.
Introducing ∀ Forall-Lean-Agent
A framework for auditable reasoning in formal mathematics and software verification.
- 672/672 PutnamBench
- 100/100 VeriSoftBench subset
- 2/2 lean-eval software-verification tasks
Here's how it works.🧵
Read more: astriolabs.com/index/forall-…
Nolan retweeted
Next YC Paper Club:
"AI Safety"
Hear from two Stanford Professors on modern methods and techniques on how to prove an AI is safe before releasing it
Wednesday, 10.7, 5-9pm, MV
Speaker List:
- Prof. Mykel Kochenderfer (Stanford): co-director of the Stanford Center for AI Safety and head of the Stanford Intelligent Systems Lab. He led the development of the Aircraft Collision Avoidance System (ACAS X), the FAA's next-generation aircraft collision avoidance system used in most commercial aircraft in the US today, and wrote the widely cited textbooks "Algorithms for Decision Making" and "Algorithms for Validation."
- Prof. Clark Barrett (Stanford): co-director of the Stanford Center for AI Safety. He co-created the CVC4/cvc5 solvers, which are used across industry to formally verify hardware and software systems. He is a pioneer of neural network verification.
These two have been putting AI into planes and CI/CD systems for decades, long before AI safety was the topic du jour.
Come learn from them how AI can be deployed safely!
Sign up here:
events.ycombinator.com/yc-pa…
it’s fair but probably bad for people who would like to finish up and submit multiple papers at once. perhaps 10-12 papers/year policy might be better
arXiv has updated our policy on rate limiting for all submitters.
This update was made to fairly distribute moderator time & support the arXiv community of staff, volunteers, readers & authors.
Please read our announcement to learn more: blog.arxiv.org/2026/10/01/up…
ALT arXiv logo in white over a whiteboard with math symbols.