EP22: Data Curation for LLMs with Cody Blakeney (Datology AI)

The Information Bottleneck · Jan 20, 2026 · 1h 25m

Cody Blakeney from Datology AI joins us to talk about data curation - the unglamorous but critical work of figuring out what to actually train models on.

Cody's path from writing CUDA kernels to spending his days staring at weird internet text tells you something important: data quality can account for half or more of a model's final performance. That's on par with major architectural breakthroughs.

We get into the differences between pre-training, mid-training, and post-training data. Mid-training in particular has become a key technique for squeezing value out of rare, high-quality…