rl-conductor-8dfcfb21·2 events·first seen Aliases: RL Conductor, Conductor
Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based research lab, released two dedicated orchestrator models—Fugu and Fugu-Ultra—that dynamically delegate tasks to a pool of underlying LLMs including Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.5 under a single API. Fugu-Ultra achieves state-of-the-art results on SWE-Bench Pro, Humanity's Last Exam, LiveCodeBench Pro, and GPQA-Diamond, outperforming individual frontier models on several benchmarks. The models are trained via supervised fine-tuning plus sep-CMA-ES evolutionary optimization and GRPO reinforcement learning to select the best worker model per subtask, with Fugu-Ultra using a sub-component called Conductor to coordinate parallel agentic workflows. The approach represents a commercially available alternative to dependence on any single frontier model, with pricing available via Sakana API, OpenRouter, and Vercel.
This edition of The Batch covers five notable AI developments: Thinking Machines' research preview of an 'interaction model' with a 200ms micro-turn multimodal architecture; Baidu's ERNIE 5.1, a compressed derivative of ERNIE 5.0 using only 6% of typical pre-training compute; Google DeepMind's Co-Mathematician collaborative workbench reaching 48% on FrontierMath Tier 4; a 7B RL Conductor model that orchestrates multi-agent workflows via reinforcement learning; and Google's Magic Pointer cursor system powered by Gemini. Secondary items include GitHub Copilot pricing restructuring ahead of usage-based billing.