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Will Brown of Prime Intellect argues LLM continual learning is the most significant unsolved challenge and requires open weights

Herbie Bradley notes cloud APIs can securely support it

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will brown@willccbb#357inTech

coherent in-the-weights continual learning is the biggest open problem left for LLMs, and anthropic is hoping it never gets solved.

deploying it broadly requires open weights. the only ZDR option is on-prem. if you are a researcher who wants open models to thrive, work on it.

4:58 PM · Jun 9, 2026 · 28.5K Views
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Omar Khattab@lateinteraction

@willccbb more on this within a ~week

will brown@willccbb

coherent in-the-weights continual learning is the biggest open problem left for LLMs, and anthropic is hoping it never gets solved.

deploying it broadly requires open weights. the only ZDR option is on-prem. if you are a researcher who wants open models to thrive, work on it.

1dViews 2.9KLikes 69Bookmarks 7
Henry Dowling@henrytdowling

@willccbb why does it require open weights? obviously open weights would make it easier, but couldn't anthropic just provide a managed solution for continual learning where the weights don't leave their premises?

1dViews 101Likes 4Bookmarks 1
Tenobrus@tenobrus

@willccbb @henrytdowling i'd guess this goes the other way and most enterprises slowly and painfully accept + adopt non-ZDR

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will brown@willccbb

@henrytdowling enterprises broadly need ZDR for sensitive info. already going to be a bottleneck for short term fable adoption, they’ll allow ZDR for it eventually, but they can’t for anything that stays in the weights.

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Herbie Bradley@herbiebradley

@willccbb the labs have had fine-tuning APIs via Azure with ZDR for a while though (SFT)? so why not just do that, but continual learning?

will brown@willccbb

coherent in-the-weights continual learning is the biggest open problem left for LLMs, and anthropic is hoping it never gets solved.

deploying it broadly requires open weights. the only ZDR option is on-prem. if you are a researcher who wants open models to thrive, work on it.

1dViews 738Likes 3Bookmarks 0
Herbie Bradley@herbiebradley

@tenobrus @willccbb @henrytdowling would bet against enterprises are just not going to be AGI pilled enough for that

1dViews 19Likes 2
will brown@willccbb

@tenobrus @henrytdowling they will if they don’t have any other viable options. but many enterprises are definitely willing to accept being N months behind the absolute frontier for small enough N. it’s a competitive lever that openai and google can reach for if they lose enough deals to ant.

1dViews 28Likes 1