Look ma, two new exoplanet candidates found via AI!
🔭
I may have found two new Earth-sized planets in our galaxy this morning!
Inspired by yesterday's reddit thread on how someone used Claude Code to find a new planet, I spent this morning searching NASA TESS data on nearby stars that TESS scanned less thoroughly (at low cadence).
To my surprise the pipeline discovered two previously undocumented exoplanet candidates:
• TIC 370612437 (Cygnus constellation, 158 light-years): dims by 0.02% every 3.56 days → ~1.0× Earth's size.
• HIP 114417 (Andromeda constellation, 134 ly): 0.03% every 4.93 days → ~1.1× Earth.
The method to find them is to search for periodic dims in light coming from a star when a planet passes in front of it. For both the candidate exoplanets, the dip repeats 55 and 21 times respectively across 4 separate observing years (2019-2024).
These are obviously tentative and unconfirmed, but several signals point to them being credible candidates:
• same dip in NASA's and MIT's separate processing of the images
• hide one year's dip and predict its times from rest of the dips (matched in 3 of 4 years)
• flip light curves to create fake signals and validate observed dips against it
The method and results were reviewed by independent agents: Codex and fresh Claude. Important caveat: a faint neighbouring pair of eclipsing stars could fake the dip, so these exoplanets remain candidates pending further verification.
What's next: report to NASA's ExoFOP as Community TESS Objects of Interest, so astronomers can verify. The next scan of these stars via TESS will happen in Aug 2027 - Apr 2028, if the preregistered dip predictions hold up, these are indeed strong candidates.
Nicknames for these exoplanets: Aakanksha (Sanskrit: aspiration) and Orbit (well, Orbit)
Some exciting updates!
A bunch of @lossfunk residents have raised funding + a few Lossfunk incubated companies have received $25k each in Google Cloud compute credits. More details below 👇
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@HariAyapps, who's building @archgen_, got into YC W26 🥳🥳
Residents who started building at Lossfunk got into @join_ef S26: the @oruel_inc team (@chastronomic, @prb5h, @nihipap) and @suryamaddula_ building @WhisperwaveAI
Former Lossfunk researcher @harshablast started Dirac Robotics as part of @join_ef S26
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A total of $175,000 in compute credits has already been disbursed to 7 Lossfunk-incubated companies, and 9 more are in the process of receiving them.
Thanks, @googlecloud, for the credits.
• athenaagent: @sachdh
• attenor: @ViraajG1
• autr: @V_J_S_1
• fpvlabs: @levelheaded_94
• grit: @timbresociety
• prometei: @navbenny
• scoutfox
5/ Our main takeaway is that a model that resists users can still defer to a misleading source, so sycophancy evals should test both.
Work led by @MajorTimbWlf21 and @paraschopra.
We thank @jarvislabs for the compute used for this project!
Tagging folks whose work we build upon and might find this interesting: @t1ngyu3 @Jack_W_Lindsey @maksym_andr @nathan84686947 @Nmndsingh @Singh_Aditya1 @NinaPanickssery
6/ Read the full paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2609.37616
Code: github.com/Lossfunk/authorit…
Website: authority-bias.vercel.app
Lossfunk retweeted
Welcome Co-host @lossfunk ❤️
Due to insane registration from u all, I cold dmmed @paraschopra to request for office space and guess what, he said yes❤️🔥
So, we are CoHosting Jev buildathon at Lossfunk office, this Sunday, the coolest event in town at the coolest venue.
Link 🔽
Lossfunk retweeted
2/2 at NeurIPS 2026! 🎉
With the Eval & Datasets decisions out, both papers I first-authored earlier this year with @lossfunk are in.
Feels really special to see both make it through. Huge congrats to my co-authors and to everyone else with accepted work!
More details soon :)
Lossfunk retweeted
Replying to @lossfunk
@lossfunk having a generational run rn. Happy to be a part of it
🥳 Excited to share that @lossfunk got 4 papers into NeurIPS main conference.
Please join me in congratulating the authors!
Aman @arcaman07, Sushrut @martisamuser, Abhinav @MajorTimbWlf21, Pranav - @Avg_sapient
First authors are all undergrads :)
🎉 We got 4 papers into NeurIPS main conference.
Congrats Aman @arcaman07, Sushrut
@martisamuser, Abhinav @MajorTimbWlf21, Pranav
@Avg_sapient, and Paras @paraschopra
First authors for all papers are undergrads.
Cheers for curiosity 🚀
Read the papers here 👇
• Hybrid Neural World Models arxiv.org/abs/2605.28317
• Frontier Coding Agents Use Metaprogramming to Adapt to Unfamiliar Programming Languages arxiv.org/abs/2606.10933
• EsoLang-Bench: Evaluating Genuine Reasoning in Large Language Models via Esoteric Programming Languages arxiv.org/abs/2603.09678
• Verified-Source Authority Is Not Generic Sycophancy: Cue-Family Decomposition of LLM Compliance lossfunk.com/papers/Verified…
We obsess about the future, and keep thinking about the asymptotes.
Hence, looking at the reality of AI capabilities today, we’ve decided to make a few changes to how we work.
• Expanding the scope of the lab beyond AI
• Raising the bar of human researchers we hire
• Rethinking our outputs beyond publications
Full post: letters.lossfunk.com/p/trave…
6/ Work led by @dhruvtrehan9 and @paraschopra.
Tagging folks whose work we build upon and might find this interesting: @KexinHuang5, @parvmahajan0, @HaokunLiu5280, @ChengleiSi @sean_n_wu, @BasselAlOmari_, @ChenhaoTan
















