Lyptus Research

Here's my updated sense of where Sean and co. are at, extremely heavily influenced by colleagues, especially Nate Rush:

• My original comment on Sean continues to stand up well today. He appears to be among the very most competent people building on top of METR work.
• The work he links above was competently executed. Their baselines/time estimates are reasonable (less common than you might think), they have a high attention-to-detail vibe, the write-up is fairly impressive and not overclaiming, etc. The work compares favorably to UK AISI's analogous work.
• Unfortunately, best guess is that all of their tasks would saturate for most recent models.

Coming out of this:

• I think it's a shame that Sean needed to dip into personal funds to pay for this project.
• I consider it ~totally obvious that Lyptus' work is worthy of further funding.
• I really, really, really, really, really want Lyptus to (1) throw more AI labor at their problems and (2) create dramatically harder cyber tasks. I think the end work will be much more useful to the degree that these things are true, less helpful to the degree they're not.
• My best guess is that unfortunately Sean is continuing his streak of under-asking for funding, wanting to bring about higher-depth proof of concepts, clarity of workstreams etc. than I feel I need to be confident for $Xk bar. From my perspective, we're in a state of extreme triage; I do not want Lyptus to be wasting time fundraising. (And to some extent wasting my time doing larger number of funding rounds!) I would like Sean to expand the maximum funding here by a minimum of $20k (so that he can absorb $20k backpay + $100k prospectively), and very plausibly by a lot more than that. I am not at all saying that I would be comfortable at $500k right now, but I think that's where we should be starting the conversation. (As in, that does not obviously seem like the maximum to me, although it doesn't feel like minimum either.)

I'm delighted to recommend funding Lyptus' maximum here; I hope they can shift work to more ambitious ends that I think would be more helpful, and I hope they ask for more funding now.

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Lyptus Research: Bridge Funding, Apr 2026

(Noting that after conversation with Nate it's now less obvious to me that Lyptus should focus on dramatically harder cyber tasks in particular. Although I continue to think that there is a very, very, very high premium on dramatically harder tasks in general. Want to leave the focus more flexible depending on Lyptus' taste.)

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Lyptus Research: Bridge Funding, Apr 2026

Recommended an additional $50k to Lyptus on same thesis as the below. I'm still curious about Lyptus absorbing more than this, but I only had another $50k in my Manifund pot! I've reached out to some funders about considering funding Lyptus further. I hope my comment below can serve as some evidence. For now, without more regrantor recommendation budget, I'm bowing out. Wishing Sean et al. the best of luck!!