Import AI 470: No rights for machines; automating environment generation with SPADE; and building better GPU kernels with Hawkeye
METR research shows that AI has seen significant acceleration in the field of network security (the rate of vulnerability reports in 2026 increased significantly compared to 2025). Mathematical research has also seen a slight acceleration but it is difficult to quantify, while there is no measurable acceleration in AI optimization itself. For automated environments, researchers at several universities have developed SPADE (Self-Play in Adaptive Synthetic Executable Environments). This framework uses a self-play mechanism to allow LLMs to alternately act as environment designers and reasoning agents, generating executable training environments (such as simulation-based biology lab puzzles) for training models and further refining them.