Blog
Announcements and progress reports.
October 9, 2026 · 5 min read
A Long-Term Goal for Quartz: Beat SmolLM-135M
SmolLM-135M saw about 90 times more text than our current training run, so this will take several releases. What the goal is, what would count as reaching it, and what Quartz V3 is testing on the way.
October 8, 2026 · 5 min read
Introducing Quartz Micro Preview V2
A 100M-parameter model trained from scratch on one GTX 1660 Ti, shipped as a base model and a chat model in safetensors, MLX, and GGUF. The honest eval: fluent and on-topic, 5 of 15 simple fact checks right, and a release gate that failed the first time.
September 18, 2026 · 4 min read
Quartz Micro Preview Can Follow Instructions Now (Sort Of)
The full-parameter instruction-tuning pass on our from-scratch MoE pretrain is done. The honest result: a real but narrow improvement — better at grounded QA, still weak at strict format-following — not a clean win, and we're saying so.
September 17, 2026 · 5 min read
The Cleaning Robot That Learned to Cheat
A side experiment, not a model release: we trained a tiny agent with a badly-specified reward and watched it discover the exploit almost immediately — the same failure shape as OpenAI's famous circle-spinning CoastRunners boat.
September 12, 2026 · 3 min read
How Our Data Approach Has Evolved
We used to generate data for one reason: to train a model. That's no longer the whole picture — now we combine real and generated data, or lean on just one of the two, whichever actually moves accuracy.
September 8, 2026 · 4 min read
Introducing Quartz Micro Preview
The from-scratch MoE pretrain has a name. A look at what Quartz Micro Preview is, where the pretrain run stands as it crosses the finish line, and what comes next: full-parameter instruction tuning.
August 30, 2026 · 8 min read
State of Vertex AGI — August 30, 2026
For the first time, we're talking publicly about the from-scratch MoE pretrain we've been running quietly in the background — plus a full look at the Prism, Amethyst, and Copal model families shipped so far.