ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered 2 Haize Labs releases since Feb 2025, most recently j1-nano & j1-micro on May 29, 2025. Highlights include j1-nano & j1-micro, Verdict. All 2 shipped with open weights. Every entry below has primary-source links and the episode segment where we covered it live.
Haize Labs releases j1-nano and j1-micro tiny reward models
Haize Labs shipped j1-nano (600M params) and j1-micro (1.7B params), tiny open reward models for judging LLM outputs. Despite their small size, j1-micro scores 80.7% on RewardBench, making capable reward modeling accessible on modest hardware.
Haize Labs open-sources Verdict, a framework for composing LLM judges
Haize Labs released Verdict, an open-source framework for composing LLM judges that tackles core LLM-as-a-judge problems: self-preference bias, prompt sensitivity, and meta-evaluation. Verdict combines simpler judging primitives into more robust and efficient evaluators ('judge-time compute scaling'), achieving near state-of-the-art results on benchmarks like ExpertQA at a fraction of the cost, fast enough to use as a real-time guardrail. Co-founders Leonard Tang and Nimit joined the show to discuss it.
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