Collinear Newsletter #8 – Notes on Improving AI
Hi AI innovators,
A lot has been happening at Collinear this month. There is fresh research, new customers, and plenty of progress towards better AI systems.
🚀 Together Evals × Collinear Simulations
We’ve partnered with Together AI to bring real world, multi-turn simulations into their Together Evals platform.
Traditional evals assume the user will be polite and consistent; real users don’t. They might ask follow-ups, change their mind, get frustrated or distracted — and that’s exactly where many models break. With TraitMix, builders can now simulate impatient, curious, or inconsistent user personas and see how their models actually perform under messy human conditions. Together Evals then scores models for helpfulness, safety, and consistency, at scale, all within one workflow.
Read the announcement here.
🐱 CoLM 2025 Recap
CoLM 2025 was a special one.
We presented our paper on adversarial testing, Cats Confuse Reasoning LLMs, and spent the week exchanging ideas with research partners, collaborators, and friends from across the community.
Our Future of Post-Training Social sparked rich discussions on alignment, fine-tuning, and reward modeling, while the booth facilitated curious research conversations (and a growing crowd of cat-sticker collectors).
It was inspiring to see so much energy around improving models not just for performance, but for reasoning and reliability.
🧠 TraitBasis Simulations Launch
We launched TraitBasis, our framework for simulating realistic human behavior in model testing.
TraitBasis uses activation steering to inject behavioral traits, impatience, confusion, skepticism, overconfidence, directly into simulated users. This lets builders observe how models hold up when conversations get unpredictable or emotionally varied.
TraitBasis builds on the research community’s work in τ-Bench, and extends it to enterprise domains such as telecom and telehealth through our new τ-Trait benchmark.
What’s Next?
That’s it for this edition. Thanks for following along.
If you’re interested in building tools that help enterprises ship safer, smarter AI, check out our Careers page.
If you are ready to improve your AI’s performance, let’s talk! We might or might not mention cats…