Molmo2 60k continuation: IMPROVED — the attach screen repoints to step_060000

2026-08-09 00:4x–01:0xZ. The +20k continuation (pre-reg, owner call 08:49Z 08-08) closed 23:21Z with its chained greedy panel eval landing 23:49Z; this is the canonical frozen read — paired vs the banked 40k endpoint npz via the new oracle-gated molmo2_60k_results.py (planted-delta fixtures + 4 abort branches), analysis banked in analysis__molmo2_60k_vs_40k_k4l2.json. Instrument integrity clean: identity and state-copy columns byte-match between the two endpoint npzs; both npzs re-pool to their reports exactly.

The reads, in pre-reg order

Read 1 (primary): was +20k worth it? Paired per-frame Δ(60k − 40k) on the 17,204 core frames, seeded bootstrap CI95: −0.1388 [−0.194, −0.090] — IMPROVED, CI entirely below zero. Pooled: 40k 6.0079/2.1871 → 60k 5.8602/2.0719 (chunk/first). The fresh-data + restored-LR bet (expectation 3, confidence medium-high) paid out at roughly −0.007/1k-steps.

Read 2 (the owner bar): 5.8602 vs AR-100k greedy 5.8026 — NOT passed (+0.058, cross-trunk unpaired, quoted with that caveat). This was expectation 4, confidence honestly “open”. Two notes that keep it interesting: the first_mae side is already past the bar (2.0719 vs 2.1431), and the Molmo2 trunk now sits 0.06 behind a run trained 1.67× longer on the Gemma trunk — at 40k the gap was 0.21 at 2.5× fewer steps.

Read 3 (integrity): state-copy / state-copy-norm byte-match across both endpoint npzs (11.78475/2.62023 — the banked panel values). Hard-abort oracle, passed silently.

Read 4 (probe trajectory, record-only): the rewarmed segment’s probe low is 6.0062@57000 — no new low vs 5.91@26,500 (expectation 2 not met). The probe subset and the panel disagree about the segment: the panel improved −0.139 paired while the probe never beat its 26.5k low — a reminder the probe is a small-sample kill-switch, not a headline.

Read 5 (decision, frozen): IMPROVED without the bar ⇒ the 60k endpoint replaces the 40k endpoint as the phase-2 flow-trunk candidate and the attach screen warm-starts from step_060000, with the bar miss noted honestly.

What the repoint changed (amendment 3, landed with this post)

Per the attach pre-reg’s amendment 3: both arm launchers and the K-smoke ladder repoint their ENDPOINT to fontaine_molmo2_ar_60k_ddp4/step_060000; attach_seam_results.py’s read-4 trunk-drift comparator now pulls the 60k panel json (band 0.3 unchanged, oracle re-run green — drift is measured from the warm-start trunk, which moved). The K-smoke memory ladder must re-run GREEN at the 60k warm start before either arm launches. Weights already on the hub (fontaine-checkpoints/fontaine_molmo2_ar_60k_ddp4/step_060000, verified 00:0xZ).

Leaderboard: row 8 (60k greedy) added; the own-topology board row moves to the 60k endpoint. The 40k rows stand as banked history.

Cost: the continuation ran ~49 GPU-h of the 60 ceiling; K1 never armed; the async-save path validated in production across the run (first-save lines checked at first babysit per the standing rule).