Ever since DeepSeek burst onto the scene in January, momentum has grown around open source Chinese artificial intelligence models. Prime Intellect, a startup specializing in decentralized AI, is currently training a frontier large language model, called INTELLECT-3, using a new kind of distributed reinforcement learning for fine-tuning. Improving AI models is no longer a matter of just ramping up training data and compute. “These reinforcement learning environments are now the bottleneck to really scaling capabilities,” Weisser tells me. Prime Intellect has created a framework that lets anyone create a reinforcement learning environment customized for a particular task.