4Latent Space (swyx)·
Latent Space: AI agents are reviving ontologies and Semantic Web concepts
A Latent Space commentary argues that AI engineers are rediscovering formal ontologies as a mechanism to constrain probabilistic agents within deterministic boundaries. The piece frames this as a revival of Semantic Web ideas applied to agentic AI systems. The argument is that structured knowledge representations help manage the unpredictability of LLM-based agents in production.
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Latent Space profiles Axiom Math on verified generation and compounding intelligence
Latent Space interviews Carina Hong of Axiom Math, a company focused on formal verification applied to AI-generated mathematics. The discussion centers on 'verified generation' and 'compounding intelligence' as frameworks for scaling AI reasoning beyond informal, unverified outputs. The piece is relevant to the growing intersection of formal methods, mathematical reasoning, and AI capability development.
Latent Space AINews: Meta-Harness Summer roundup
Latent Space's AINews digest covers a period they're calling 'Meta-Harness Summer,' signaling a trend toward higher-order agent harness tooling — frameworks that orchestrate or compose other harnesses. The piece appears to be a community news roundup from a tier-2 commentary source. The framing suggests growing ecosystem maturity in agent orchestration tooling.
Latent Space: Skill engineering and the case against one-shot AI design
Paul Bakaus discusses 'skill engineering' as a design philosophy for AI-assisted workflows, arguing against fully automated one-shot AI pipelines in favor of keeping humans in the loop. The conversation centers on Impeccable, a tool or approach Bakaus is developing, and the concept of 'loopmaxxing' — iterative human-agent collaboration cycles. The piece addresses why current agents still require human steering to produce high-quality outputs.
Lila Sciences bets on scientific data as the last frontier for AI training
Latent Space interviews Andy Beam and Rafa Gómez-Bombarelli of Lila Sciences, a lab building robotic scientific infrastructure to generate novel training data for AI. The core thesis is that scientific experimentation—not internet text—is the next major untapped data source for frontier AI. The piece covers what this looks like operationally, including a room full of robots conducting experiments.
Comparative Study: Semantic Metadata vs. Unstructured Web Retrieval for Agentic Data Discovery
This paper evaluates whether LLM-based agents still need structured semantic metadata (e.g., schema.org) for data retrieval, comparing a Baseline Agent searching open-web documents against a Semantic Agent leveraging 90 million schema.org-annotated datasets. Using an LLM-as-a-judge pipeline aligned to FAIR principles, the Semantic Agent achieves 65.7% higher overall precision in retrieving FAIR-compliant datasets, while the Baseline Agent answers 40% more questions but frequently returns prose-heavy or portal landing pages instead of actionable data. The study concludes that structured semantic ecosystems remain essential for reliable, execution-oriented agentic workflows despite LLMs' broad unstructured retrieval capabilities.
Latent Space highlights 'Loopcraft' concept from Steinberger, Cherny, and Karpathy
Latent Space's AINews digest spotlights a conceptual framework called 'Loopcraft' — described as the art of stacking loops — attributed to Peter Steinberger, Boris Cherny, and Andrej Karpathy. The piece appears to be a commentary or synthesis of ideas from these practitioners about agentic loop architectures or iterative AI workflows. The body is sparse, so the full technical substance is unclear from the excerpt alone.
AINews: Agents for Everything Else — Codex for Knowledge Work, Claude for Creative Work
A Latent Space daily AI news digest reflecting on the expanding scope of coding agents beyond software development into knowledge work and creative work domains. The piece uses OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude as anchoring examples of agents 'breaking containment' from their original coding/assistant niches. Published as a quieter news day commentary, it surveys the broadening agent ecosystem landscape.
The Age of Async Agents — Cognition's Walden Yan & OpenInspect's Cole Murray
A Latent Space podcast episode featuring Cognition's Walden Yan and OpenInspect's Cole Murray discussing the current state of autonomous software engineering agents. Topics include Devin's reported 80% commit rate, spec-to-PR workflows, full VM environments for agents, agent memory, and the emerging pattern of product managers shipping code directly. The conversation covers practical deployment patterns and tooling for async agentic coding workflows.