Niklas Muennighoff

Stanford researcher and lead author of "s1: Simple test-time scaling" (arXiv:2501.19393, 2025), the paper showing that fine-tuning an existing open model on 1,000 curated, distilled reasoning traces reproduced much of o1-preview-level math performance in 26 minutes of training.

Matters to this vault as the central figure in its s1 cluster on two counts: his paper is the source of the 1,000-trace, 26-minute result, and he is also the only named human TechCrunch quotes with a dollar figure for the training cost — "about $20" for renting the necessary compute "today" — a different, differently-framed number from the "under $50" headline TechCrunch attributes to the paper itself, which contains no dollar figure anywhere.

References

• claim-s1-distilled-reasoning-from-1000-traces-in-26-minutes
• claim-s1-paper-has-no-dollar-figure-only-gpu-hours
• claim-techcrunch-under-50-headline-not-supported-by-s1-paper