Auto-research for ML training models is all the rage now, but underrated is: auto-research for data! Sure, you can squeeze out a bit of model performance by optimizing hyperparameters, but code agents can do data work that has been very labour intensive and required a lot of attention to a lot details effortlessly: > download data from many different data sources > bring all the data sources into uniform format > do detailed EDA: find patterns and outliers > look at 100s of samples and take detailed notes > make beautiful infographics rather than mpl plots > iterate on data filtering by looking at more samples > make a simple pipelines robust and scalable It's now possible to write data pipelines for dozens of data sources in hours that would have taken weeks of reading many docs, debugging APIs and data formats, wrangling outliers and missing data. A few weeks ago we gave Claude access to the CPU partition of our cluster and it iteratively refined filters to retrieve a domain subset of FineWeb. This would have taken me 2-3 days to work through while it took Claude just a few hours with almost no babysitting and with a nice logbook. Thus the long tail of small, niche data sources becomes more accessible and can be aggregated to even larger high quality datasets for cool applications. Data has been fuelling LLM progress more than model architecture innovations, so I am very excited about this!

→ View original post on X — @thom_wolf, 2026-03-24 17:04 UTC