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Sarthak Mittal

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@sarthmit

Montréal, Québec sarthmit.github.io Joined February 2019
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Sarthak Mittal Verified account @sarthmit
Is distribution sharpening actually the future of scaling, or just a massive hype train? 📉

We put it to the test using an RL framework – simulating everything from sharpening to task reward optimization.

Result: It’s not the silver bullet everyone thinks it is!
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Sarthak Mittal Verified account @sarthmit
Cool work, happy to see it out finally! Always fun to follow and debate around Eric's quest for understanding compositionality!
Eric Elmoznino @EricElmoznino Oct 29
Couldn't be happier to announce my new paper on defining compositional structure — and generating it! I see this project as the culmination of my PhD, as it unifies all my interests: compositionality, compression, structure, and open-endedness. More below! arxiv.org/abs/2610.20922
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Sarthak Mittal Verified account @sarthmit
Haven't posted on X in a while so figured I'd do a small update. I moved to London a bit more than 4 months ago and joined @MistralAI as an AI Scientist.

I will also be at COLM this week, presenting arxiv.org/abs/2604.16259 (oral) on Wed, and looking forward to meeting people!
arxiv.org Beyond Distribution Sharpening: The Importance of Task Rewards Frontier models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities following the integration of task-reward-based reinforcement learning (RL) into their training pipelines, enabling systems to evolve from...
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Sarthak Mittal Verified account @sarthmit
Spot on.
jietang Verified account @jietang Aug 19
Thoughts About Scaling Law

Scaling, but not only of parameters. Every model release now ends with the same question: how many parameters? It isn't a question that can be answered on its own. Parameter count is only meaningful alongside three others — how much data you have, where you intend to spend your compute, and who will run the model, under what conditions.

The field learned this the hard way. Kaplan et al. (2020) fit an exponent that told everyone to grow parameters faster than data — roughly 2.7:1 — and the industry complied: GPT-3, Gopher, MT-NLG. Hoffmann et al. (2022) redid the experiment across four hundred models and found the compute-optimal split is closer to 20 tokens per parameter, and that with sufficient compute the two should grow at the same rate rather than drifting apart. The error in the earlier fit compounded with every order of magnitude of compute, which is why the largest models of that generation were the most misallocated. The trillion-parameter round was, in retrospect, a detour the whole field took together and then reversed.

Chinchilla wasn't the end either. It optimized training compute for models that would be trained once and evaluated. Today a model is called billions of times a day and inference dominates lifetime cost. Put inference into the objective and the optimum moves toward smaller models trained far longer — deliberate over-training, which is what Llama-2-7B and Gemma-2-9B were doing at roughly 290 and 889 tokens per parameter.

Sparsity moved the target again. In a MoE model two quantities have to be kept apart: total parameters govern roughly how much the model can hold — knowledge, facts, the long tail — while activated parameters and effective depth govern roughly how far it can think, how many steps of a causal chain it can carry before it comes apart. A dense 20:1 ratio does not transfer. And the ratio isn't a single number at all: Roberts et al. (2025) find the optimal tokens-per-parameter is task-dependent, with memorization favoring more parameters and reasoning favoring more data. Follow-up work on MoE observes that at fixed TPP, pushing total parameters higher actually degrades reasoning, while activating more experts reliably helps it.

This matters for what we are building toward. Finding a vulnerability is not a retrieval problem. It doesn't come from having memorized more CVEs; it comes from carrying a twenty-step chain of inference to the end without losing the thread. That capability does not live in total parameter count.

Which brings us to this release. Total parameters appear to matter up to a threshold — enough to hold the world — after which additional capability comes from scaling elsewhere: effective depth per forward pass, and above all post-training. GLM-5.3 is our controlled experiment on that claim. Same base, same architecture, same total and activated parameters as GLM-5.2. One month of scaling long-horizon environments and RL. The gains are not marginal. Well, scaling has more than one dial. We turned the post-training one this time because it had the most slack left in it — not because the others are finished. Base model size, pretraining data, compute spent per forward pass: all of them are still on the table, and we will come back to each. What this experiment taught us is that the dials do not have to be turned together, and that the one worth turning next is rarely the one that was worth turning last. We are not done scaling. Next time, maybe mid-training, pre-training, and even more.
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Sarthak Mittal Verified account @sarthmit
Wow
Anthropic Verified account @AnthropicAI Jun 13
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.

The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

Access to all other Claude models is not affected.

We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.

Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
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