Factual - GoKawiil

Engineer recounts failed scaling bets at startups Runa and Factual

A software engineer's essay recalls working at Runa, an early-stage startup that tried to offer dynamic pricing to small online retailers using Clojure and HBase, which never achieved the scale it expected and was eventually acquired by Staples mainly for its 'innovation' credentials before being shut down. The essay also describes a subsequent role at Factual, which built a global index of places using Java, embedded JavaScript, and later Clojure.

ideolalia.com · 2026-10-28

Google and Technion find frontier LLMs often 'know' facts they fail to recall

A new study from Google Research and Technion shows that when models like GPT-5 and Gemini-3 hallucinate, the underlying fact is usually already stored in their parameters rather than missing entirely. The researchers found these models encode 95-98% of tested facts, but often fail to surface them during generation due to retrieval, not storage, limits. They propose 'fact-level profiling' to separate whether a fact is encoded versus reliably retrievable across different phrasings.

venturebeat.com · 2026-09-01