State of Data — Sean Cai, Independent / State of Data

Cai separates saved outputs from process data: trajectories, decisions, and reasoning traces. He calls minimally shaped real workflows **Type 1 data** and expert-manufactured examples **Type 2 data**, arguing that realism comes from the work itself.

For coding agents, capture actual tool use, state transitions, failure recovery, and outcomes. Evaluate across harnesses and infrastructure: a score from **one benchmark under one scaffold** is only one sample, not a stable measure of capability.

The talk presents a market thesis, not a controlled study. Its claimed **20–30 vendor** diversification and benchmark failure modes are not quantified in the transcript, while domains such as robotics still face unresolved choices about what data modality to collect.