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Timeline

The Sutro Group story in order, from the energy thesis to a four-challenge lab.

A chronological index of the work. Each month links to its full recap; the dated milestones below come from the SutroYaro changelog, the catch-ups, and the recaps.

February 2026: formation

  • The group forms around one thesis: AI training sits orders of magnitude above its energy floor, and the waste is data movement, not arithmetic (first archived messages Feb 9).
  • Agent loops on Karpathy's makemore and microGPT names task prove too slow (about 3 minutes per run), which pushes the search for a faster toy problem.

Read the February recap.

March 2026: the repo and GF(2)

  • Yad creates SutroYaro (Mar 3) and ships a 33-experiment survey (v0.9.0, Mar 7).
  • GF(2) Gaussian elimination settles sparse parity, about 1000x faster than SGD (verified Mar 9), while local learning rules fail at chance.
  • The repo moves to the cybertronai org (Mar 14).
  • Meeting #9 (Mar 16) shifts the cost metric from ARD to DMC.
  • Yad's RL eval environment (PR #49), agent loop, Telegram sync (issue #58), and the sparse-parity-challenge pipeline all land (late March).
  • First weekly catch-up (Mar 22).

Read the March recap.

April 2026: ByteDMD

  • ByteDMD is adopted as the primary metric (v0.27.0, Apr 14): byte-granularity, pure Python, no numpy escape hatch.
  • Yad and Seth's floor-gap survey measures the distance to the best possible. KM-min sits 3.8x above the read-floor, GF(2) 1,450x (v0.29.0).
  • Yad ships StackUnderflow (Apr 21).
  • Challenge #2, energy-efficient matmul, launches (Apr 30).
  • Yaroslav pivots from treating ByteDMD as a bound to modeling energy directly on a 2D Manhattan grid (Apr 27).

Read the April recap.

May 2026: four challenges

  • Yad's wave-build swarms ship two catalogs: hinton-problems (53 stubs, May 3) and schmidhuber-problems (58 stubs, May 8).
  • Challenge #3, sparse parity on the grid, opens (May 8); the wikitext challenge gets its own repo (May 12).
  • SutroYaro is reshuffled to its lab-memory role, and Yad's Telegram sync expands from 6 to all 11 forum topics (v0.30.0, May 20).
  • A Modal hackathon centered on auto-research loops (May 30 and 31).

Read the May recap.

June 2026: auto-research loops

  • Yad's auto-research-loop dispatcher kit and a worked LeCun SPEC ship (v0.31.0, May 29), packaging the wave-build method for a second operator.
  • A new thread opens on a structure-specific optimizer for self-attention.
  • The hackathon is debriefed at the June 1 meeting. This Almanac begins.

Read the June recap.