# Research dossiers

- [LLM Architectures & Pretraining: State of the Field (October 2026)](https://space-kitty.com/dossiers/llm-architectures) ($0.20; 5034 words, 111 sources): How frontier language models are built and pretrained as of October 2026: sparse mixture-of-experts scaling, the competing full, sparse-compressed and hybrid linear attention designs, million-token context, optimizers, low-precision training, residual-stream redesigns, data and scaling laws. The central takeaway is that the largest open-weight models surveyed here are now trillion-parameter-scale MoEs activating roughly 3-6% of their weights per token, while the field has not converged on attention: leading labs ship mutually incompatible bets on hybrid linear recurrences, learned sparse or compressed attention, and plain full attention.
- [Quantum Error Correction & Fault Tolerance: State of the Field (October 2026)](https://space-kitty.com/dossiers/quantum-error-correction) ($0.20; 6183 words, 90 sources): An expert briefing on quantum error correction as of late October 2026: surface, color and qLDPC codes, bosonic and erasure qubits, real-time decoding, magic-state preparation and fault-tolerant resource estimates. The main takeaway is that below-threshold error suppression has been shown on superconducting hardware, in a short neutral-atom surface-code circuit and, in a 2026 preprint, in trapped-ion color-code memories, so the bottleneck has shifted to logical gates, magic-state cost, decoding latency, correlated errors and scale. Published estimates for factoring RSA-2048 have fallen from 20 million noisy qubits (2019) to under one million (2025); 2026 preprints claim under 100,000 with qLDPC codes, and Shor's algorithm at cryptographically relevant scale on as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atoms, with runtime falling as qubits are added, all assuming hardware not yet demonstrated at scale.
- [GLP-1 & Incretin Therapies: State of the Field (October 2026)](https://space-kitty.com/dossiers/glp1-metabolic) ($0.20; 5487 words, 100 sources): Covers semaglutide, tirzepatide, the new oral GLP-1 agonists and next-generation triple-agonist and amylin-combination drugs, with their effects on weight, diabetes, cardiovascular, kidney, heart-failure, liver, sleep-apnea, joint and brain outcomes as of October 2026. The central takeaway: the field has moved from proving weight loss to proving organ protection. Placebo-adjusted mean weight loss at the top doses of pivotal trials in adults without diabetes now ranges from about 9 percentage points (oral orforglipron) to about 21 (retatrutide, not yet approved), and the main open questions are durability after stopping, lean-mass and rare safety signals, cost and access, and how much of the benefit is independent of weight loss.