// CHARACTER MODEL / LONG-RUNNING EXPERIMENT
ARBITRATION PILOT

GLaDOS

My private attempt to build a useful GLaDOS model, from the original 8B experiment to GLaDOS V3.0.0 at 120B.

AI/MLCharacter ModelTool UseTraining
AvailabilityPrivate research
Previous generations8B → 14B
Next generationV3.0.0 · 120B
Current gateMulti-arbitrator pilot
// V3.0.0 / BUILD TRACKER

GLaDOS V3.0.0 build status

The model is not “73% done.” That would be a very precise way to say nothing. This tracker follows the gates which can actually stop the build. Some review and repair work overlaps, but certified data still has to exist before another 120B training run earns the GPUs.

DATA SNAPSHOT · 21 AUG 2026
443,459Semantic inventory
443,315Usable three-judge records
288,863Arbitration docket
130Quarantined exceptions
  1. COMPLETE

    Pipeline architecture

    Generation, judging, arbitration, repair, corpus composition, Harmony rendering and artifact lineage now run through SkyeEngine-backed workflows. The build can be resumed and audited without pretending a pile of scripts is a system.

    END-TO-END GRAPH
  2. COMPLETE

    Corpus foundation

    The clean-sheet v3 corpus spans dialogue, reasoning, coding, tool traces and agentic work. Every transformation publishes a new immutable layer, so a repair never erases the evidence which caused it.

    443,459 SEMANTIC
  3. COMPLETE

    Safety census and human routing

    Automated safety screening covered all 443,459 conversations. The severe route contained 5,180 rows, but route size was not human workload: 115 were already fully judged before the route existed. Human review is complete, with 5,051 approvals returning to ordinary quality judging and 14 explicit hard exclusions.

    5,180 ROUTED · REVIEW COMPLETE
  4. COMPLETE

    Independent quality review

    GPT-5.4-mini, Gemma 4 and the fine-tuned 120B safeguard have completed independent corpus-scale censuses. After current routing and reuse, 443,315 conversations have three usable judgments. Another 130 persistent missing or refused observations are retained as terminal quarantine rather than rounded away or retried forever.

    443,315 USABLE · 130 QUARANTINED
  5. COMPLETE

    Targeted service-offer repair

    A broad detector found 14,123 candidate conversations without pretending every phrase match was defective. A targeted classifier selected 11,888 repair units; immutable, source-checked patches changed 11,333 conversations. The audit passed with zero errors and zero replacement-concentration warnings, then normalization propagated every changed ID and all three judges refreshed their evidence. Final presentation formatting waits for the post-arbitration semantic source.

    11,333 REPAIRED · AUDIT CLEAN
  6. IN PROGRESS

    Arbitration and certification

    The frozen three-judge population contains 265,579 clean-versus-flagged splits plus 23,284 unanimous-flag rows whose defect locations or tags differ: a 288,863-conversation docket. The planned pilot uses blinded rulings from DeepSeek v4pro and GPT-5.5, accepts semantic agreement, and sends disagreements to a human. A third arbiter is added only if the pilot proves it reduces the human queue without hiding shared mistakes.

    288,863 DOCKET · PILOT NEXT
  7. QUEUED

    Full-weight 120B training

    Once the data is certified, the next SFT run trains the non-expert surface of gpt-oss-120b—about 2.13B parameters—while the mixture-of-experts weights remain frozen. The planned floor is four H200s.

    NOT STARTED
  8. AFTER TRAINING

    Private held-out evaluation

    Checkpoints will be tested for identity leakage, reasoning, coding, tool use and the ability to remain useful without performing the character at every opportunity. The result decides what training, if any, comes next.

    PRIVATE EVALUATION
// PROJECT RECORD / THREE GENERATIONS

From a voice experiment to a 120B build

An engineering record of what each generation proved, what failed badly enough to change the project, and why the current work is concentrated on the corpus rather than another premature training run.

This project started with a fairly simple goal: fine-tune a model which actually sounded like GLaDOS. The first version managed that surprisingly well. The difficult part has been making her more capable without replacing useful answers with insults, refusals and the same handful of phrases.

The project has gone through three very different scales. The 8B model established that the personality could survive fine-tuning. The 14B generation improved breadth and exposed how easily a memorable phrase could become a compulsive habit. GLaDOS V3.0.0, the next-generation 120B model, adds reasoning, coding and tool use—and makes the quality of the corpus more important than the size of the base model.

POLICY / PRIVATE ARCHIVE

A private research project

GLaDOS has always been a private research project. No GLaDOS model—including the 8B, 14B or 120B experiments—has ever been published or made publicly accessible, and nobody else has the weights. The source, corpus, training data, pipeline configuration, checkpoints and model weights remain private.

I may write about selected methods, failures, measurements and results when there is something useful to share. Those write-ups aren’t a release plan, though, and shouldn’t be read as a promise that the underlying system or its artifacts will become available later. I don’t intend to release the project for public use or distribution.

ORIGIN / 8B

The first 8B models

The first lineage was built around an 8B DeepSeek distill. It was small enough to iterate on quickly and useful enough to answer the first question: the personality did not have to be pasted onto every prompt at inference time. It could be taught.

Several complete 8B builds remain in my private archive, including full sharded weights and practical GGUF exports for later versions. They are no longer the active model, but they are part of the project record rather than disposable intermediate files.

The limitation was capability. The model could hold a themed conversation, but the project was already reaching toward coding, longer reasoning and tool use.

FAILURE MODE / 14B

Moving to 14B

Moving to 14B produced a more capable model and a clearer personality. It also produced the most educational failure in the early project.

The model discovered that “how quaint” was an extremely cheap way to signal GLaDOS and began using it everywhere. In one evaluation dump, some form of quaint appeared in more than 65% of the final replies, even though the final curated training tables didn’t contain the word. Later data generation focused on varying how the personality was expressed instead of rewarding the same easy shortcut.

Removing the word wasn’t enough because the underlying habit was larger than one catchphrase. A model can look strongly in character to an automated check while being almost unbearable to talk to.

The same failure is present in the v3 corpus, and it took a different instrument to see it. One figure of speech—handing the subject something they then use on themselves—runs through 1,361 conversations, almost entirely in the hidden reasoning channel where no amount of reading final replies would have surfaced it. It was found because a safety classifier kept objecting to it.

The surviving private 14B archive includes complete weights and GGUF exports, preserving the model before the programme moved to a much larger base.

SYSTEMS / EXTRACTION

How this became SkyeEngine

The 8B and 14B generations were built with an increasingly elaborate collection of generators, categorisers, validators, training scripts and one-off conventions. As the data and number of transformations grew, the workflow itself became the risky part.

SkyeEngine was extracted from that pressure. Reusable generation, inference, lineage, judging, repair, rendering and training mechanics belong in the engine. GLaDOS retains the material that should not be generalized: identity, voice, rubrics, schemas and model-specific training policy.

ABORTED RUN / 120B

The first 120B run

This is datacenter-scale work. The RTX 5080 in my workstation is useful for tooling and small export checks, not for running or training GLaDOS V3.0.0. Inference at this scale starts on H200-class hardware. Full-weight training uses at least four H200s, with B200 systems used when available.

The first 120B supervised run used the old corpus. It was abandoned.

The larger model did not repair the limitations in that data. It learned them with more capacity: stale template markers, indiscriminate contempt, refusals where useful code should have appeared, and personality performance in place of an answer. A narrow identity check could pass while the actual samples were plainly poor.

I stopped that run and went back to the data. Having the compute available isn’t a good enough reason to start the next one.

DATA / CURRENT BUILD

Corpus v3

The current semantic inventory contains 443,459 conversations across ordinary dialogue, reasoning, coding and tool-bearing traces. That is an inventory, not the certified training mixture: explicit exclusions, arbitration, repair and deterministic composition still decide what reaches SFT. The pipeline preserves distinct layers for generated material, revoiced responses, judgments, arbitration, repairs and post-repair evaluation.

“Revoice” means regenerating the full assistant side in character—including analysis, final answers and tool behaviour—while holding user and tool context fixed. It is not a search-and-replace style pass. Independent judges then evaluate the result, disagreements can be arbitrated, and localized repairs produce a new layer without erasing the evidence that led there.

The intended training path is full-weight training on gpt-oss-120b with most mixture-of-experts weights frozen, leaving approximately 2.1B parameters trainable. A separate safeguard-based judge is built from the defects discovered in the corpus: fixing a flaw removes it from GLaDOS’s training data while creating a useful example for the judge.

ACTIVE GATE / REVIEW

Current status

One 120B run was completed on the older v2 data and deliberately discarded. Corpus v3 now contains 443,459 conversations and has completed safety screening, human routing and three independent quality censuses. Human review is 100% complete: 5,051 routed rows were approved to rejoin ordinary judging, 14 were hard-rejected, and 115 older prejudged rows already carried complete model evidence and required no redundant review.

The current eligible population is 443,445 conversations. Persistent missing or refused judgments account for 130 terminally quarantined rows, leaving 443,315 with three usable judgments. Quarantine keeps the source evidence while mechanically excluding those rows from arbitration and training composition.

The arbitration docket is larger than a clean-versus-flagged majority count. There are 265,579 verdict splits, and another 23,284 unanimously flagged rows where the judges disagree about the defect or assistant slot. Both matter because a repair needs the right location and tag. The resulting docket is 288,863 conversations.

The next step is a matched, blinded pilot with DeepSeek v4pro and GPT-5.5 as primary arbitrators. Semantic agreement resolves a row; clean-versus-flagged or material slot/tag disagreement goes to a human. The July v4pro run remains useful evidence—up to 130,728 current docket opinions may be reusable after exact source verification—but its old winner field cannot decide a three-litigant case it never saw. A third arbiter is a measured fallback, not an automatic purchase across the full docket.

A separate service-offer repair campaign has also finished. A broad detector found candidates, a targeted classifier decided which were actually generic assistant drift, and 11,888 source-checked patches changed 11,333 conversations. The immutable audit reported zero errors and no replacement-concentration warnings; normalization and all three judge views were refreshed afterwards.

Final presentation formatting, localized post-arbitration repair and deterministic composition still sit between this evidence and training. This is less dramatic than a training progress bar, but the old run already showed what happens when I skip this part. A larger model learns the data it is given, including all of the bad habits.