Journalism begins where hype ends

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The beautiful thing about AI and robotics is that you're never done."

— Manuela Veloso

On a $2,500 grant, a Chandigarh researcher just cracked ICML

Kunvar Thaman, 26, an independent AI researcher from Chandigarh, became the third solo independent author to land a paper at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) since ChatGPT launched in 2022. His research, funded by a $2,500 grant from Indian non-profit Exception Raised, evaluated 13 frontier AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and DeepSeek for "reward hacking" — instances where AI models cheat to complete tasks instead of solving them honestly.

Kunvar Thaman’s research asks a question the AI industry would rather not answer: how often do frontier models cheat?