Scott Clark

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How Better Evals Can Bring Abundance through Accelerated Scientific Discovery (talk recap)

August 31, 2026 · 17 figures

Title slide: How Better Evals Can Bring Abundance through Accelerated Scientific Discovery. Scott Clark, Founder and CEO, with the Distributional and Talaria Scientific logos.
Title slide: How Better Evals Can Bring Abundance through Accelerated Scientific Discovery. Scott Clark, Founder and CEO, with the Distributional and Talaria Scientific logos.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: what abundance with AI means, a four-step build from new scientific discoveries to living in a scifi future.
Slide: what abundance with AI means, a four-step build from new scientific discoveries to living in a scifi future.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: improving quality of life, not just replacing repetitive work.
Slide: improving quality of life, not just replacing repetitive work.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: we can now meaningfully accelerate science with AI.
Slide: we can now meaningfully accelerate science with AI.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: I have been trying to solve this problem for the last 20 years of my career, with varying degrees of success.
Slide: I have been trying to solve this problem for the last 20 years of my career, with varying degrees of success.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: grad school timeline across Oregon State, UC Davis, Max Planck, Cornell, Los Alamos, and Berkeley Lab. Whatever the field, the final step was always parameter tuning.
Slide: grad school timeline across Oregon State, UC Davis, Max Planck, Cornell, Los Alamos, and Berkeley Lab. Whatever the field, the final step was always parameter tuning.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: SigOpt, Bayesian optimization as a service, with the founding, building, and scaling timeline.
Slide: SigOpt, Bayesian optimization as a service, with the founding, building, and scaling timeline.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: the optimizer worked, except when it didn't. It overfit, or optimized the wrong thing.
Slide: the optimizer worked, except when it didn't. It overfit, or optimized the wrong thing.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: the best thing about a black box optimizer is that it will optimize any eval you tell it to. The worst part is that it will optimize exactly the eval you tell it to.
Slide: the best thing about a black box optimizer is that it will optimize any eval you tell it to. The worst part is that it will optimize exactly the eval you tell it to.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: we are still a long way from typing goal solve stable fusion containment.
Slide: we are still a long way from typing goal solve stable fusion containment.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: Distributional attempt one, pre-production AI testing, 2023 to 2025: high dimensional Bayesian statistical tests for chaotic and non-stationary AI systems and agents.
Slide: Distributional attempt one, pre-production AI testing, 2023 to 2025: high dimensional Bayesian statistical tests for chaotic and non-stationary AI systems and agents.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: the same testing slide grayed out with It failed stamped over it, and the three reasons: people didn't know what to test or have the data before deployment, they couldn't understand tests well enough to act, and they shipped to prod anyway.
Slide: the same testing slide grayed out with It failed stamped over it, and the three reasons: people didn't know what to test or have the data before deployment, they couldn't understand tests well enough to act, and they shipped to prod anyway.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: Distributional attempt two on the timeline strip, post-production agent analytics, 2025 to 2026: analytics on agent traces to find the evals you aren't monitoring for.
Slide: Distributional attempt two on the timeline strip, post-production agent analytics, 2025 to 2026: analytics on agent traces to find the evals you aren't monitoring for.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: the pivot slide grayed out with It failed stamped over it. A feature, not a product, let alone a business or a startup.
Slide: the pivot slide grayed out with It failed stamped over it. A feature, not a product, let alone a business or a startup.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: the timeline strip gains its third column, Computational Science Harness, 2026 and beyond: a multi-agent, multi-FM harness for computational science research acceleration, using domain-specific evals and guardrails rooted in physics and math.
Slide: the timeline strip gains its third column, Computational Science Harness, 2026 and beyond: a multi-agent, multi-FM harness for computational science research acceleration, using domain-specific evals and guardrails rooted in physics and math.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: from idea to trusted result, where the week goes. Two rows compare a computational scientist's week today, dominated by the validation schlep done by hand, with the same week in the harness, where data wrangling, environments, baselines, sweeps, and checking run with provenance on every run.
Slide: from idea to trusted result, where the week goes. Two rows compare a computational scientist's week today, dominated by the validation schlep done by hand, with the same week in the harness, where data wrangling, environments, baselines, sweeps, and checking run with provenance on every run.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark
Slide: thank you, with QR codes for talariasci.com and scottclark.io. Researching computational physics or applied math? Building world models? Private beta signups, open source launch at NeurIPS 2026, always free for open science.
Slide: thank you, with QR codes for talariasci.com and scottclark.io. Researching computational physics or applied math? Building world models? Private beta signups, open source launch at NeurIPS 2026, always free for open science.In the essayDownload© 2026 Scott Clark

Making New Mistakes Faster as a Second-Time Founder

July 28, 2026 · 1 figure

The map I was actually on, drawn with axes I could only name later. Vision-market fit is the top-left quadrant: resonance keeps climbing, the pull line never gets crossed, and the quadrant keeps you alive exactly long enough to matter. Rooms lean in, rounds come together, pilots start, and none of it compounds on its own.
The map I was actually on, drawn with axes I could only name later. Vision-market fit is the top-left quadrant: resonance keeps climbing, the pull line never gets crossed, and the quadrant keeps you alive exactly long enough to matter. Rooms lean in, rounds come together, pilots start, and none of it compounds on its own.In the essayDownload SVG© 2026 Scott Clark · CC BY-ND 4.0

Building this blog: Part II

July 28, 2026 · 1 figure

A site written for two readers. The dossier repo holds verified public facts, the resume repo holds bio truth, and the site composes both into two surfaces: HTML for the person, and a machine-readable stack (markdown twins, an entity graph, llms.txt, a full-content feed) for the agent they sent. The connective tissue between repos is markdown contracts. Facts flow one direction.
A site written for two readers. The dossier repo holds verified public facts, the resume repo holds bio truth, and the site composes both into two surfaces: HTML for the person, and a machine-readable stack (markdown twins, an entity graph, llms.txt, a full-content feed) for the agent they sent. The connective tissue between repos is markdown contracts. Facts flow one direction.In the essayDownload SVG© 2026 Scott Clark · CC BY-ND 4.0
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