Latent Space · Monday, October 26, 2026
Ian Quigley shares that testing foundation models on drug discovery tasks revealed unexpected behavioral differences regarding resource allocation. More performant models are significantly quicker at recognizing bad trajectories and abandoning unproductive chemical neighborhoods, whereas weaker models tend to repeat unhelpful loops.
“And it turns out that more performant models are much better at abandoning kind of unproductive neighborhoods. And that was actually a really interesting surprise for us.”
“And what happens with the dumber models, they'll just keep running little subtle changes on molecules that aren't ever going to go anywhere. Like, oh, these two have a low score, but I feel good about them, and so I'm going to keep trying stuff. And then the smarter models will abandon the entire process. We're going to go somewhere else.”