# New Podcast Episode - TMax: Closing the Frontier Gap With Open Data

> Source: <https://blog.neurometric.ai/p/new-podcast-episode-tmax-closing>
> Published: 2026-08-07 18:24:35+00:00

This week, Cooper and Yash (Neurometric AI) unpack TMax, a paper out of AI2 (the Allen Institute for AI) that takes a genuinely different approach to closing the gap between small open-weight models and frontier labs — not by training a bigger model, but by open-sourcing the entire recipe: data, code, and technique.

The paper focuses on terminal agents — models given nothing but command-line access as a tool, which turns out to be enough to tackle an enormous range of tasks, from software engineering to security work to scheduling. Using this recipe, AI2 boosted a Qwen model’s Terminal-Bench score from roughly 25% to 31%, closing meaningful ground on Claude Haiku’s roughly 33%.

What made this one worth an episode wasn’t just the score bump. It was the design choices behind it.

Watch on YouTube: [https://youtu.be/4U0gqv9sSn4?si=ejv04gktGbTOMJM8](https://youtu.be/4U0gqv9sSn4?si=ejv04gktGbTOMJM8)

Listen:[ https://tokenengineering.podbean.com](https://tokenengineering.podbean.com/)

Paper: TMax: A recipe for terminal agents —[ https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23321](https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23321)