@dair_ai
Outstanding paper on long-horizon agents. (bookmark it) Similar to humans, how do you make agents persist on a difficult task, and how is that useful? And which models today work well on this? This new work, AutoLab, explores this question and how encoding persistence in agents is beneficial for tasks such as auto research and engineering tasks. Can a model keep improving an artifact for hours, under a strict wall-clock budget, the way real research and engineering actually work? Results: AutoLab hands agents 36 expert-curated tasks across system optimization, model development, CUDA kernels, and puzzles, each starting from a correct but deliberately suboptimal baseline. Across 17 frontier models, the dominant predictor of success was not the quality of the first attempt. It was persistence, repeatedly benchmarking, editing, and folding in empirical feedback. It appears that Claude-opus-4.6 sustained that loop well. Most of the other models quit early or burned the budget, making almost no progress. Paper: https://t.co/jb8uYR0fpE Learn to build effective AI agents in our academy: https://t.co/LRnpZN7L4c