Hackbot R&D

I’m a researcher working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and computer security. I work at Dreadnode training and evaluating the hacking capabilities of agents. I’ll be working in this field until we see hacking’s move 37.
Shane Caldwell

All Reduce Across the Atlantic: Bandwidth in Decentralized Training

The practical realities of devestatingly high communication cost in training.

December 12, 2025 · 17 min · 3551 words · Shane Caldwell

Twenty Billion Tokens of What, Exactly?

Looking at the data and letting it look back at us.

December 1, 2025 · 23 min · 4761 words · Shane Caldwell

Pretraining at home: 20B tokens from 222 hours to 12

Optimizing training a Llama 3.2 1B model so we can pretrain in a day without going broke.

November 23, 2025 · 21 min · 4329 words · Shane Caldwell

The Input Sanitization Perspective on Prompt Injection

So, you mixed user input and instructions.

July 2, 2023 · 23 min · 4772 words · Shane Caldwell

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Security: Toward an Autonomous Pentesting Agent

A manifesto on RL in cybersecurity, from when deep RL was the thing.

April 28, 2020 · 29 min · 6176 words · Shane Caldwell

An ML Eng's Review of OSCP

Because you shouldn’t try and automate anything you can’t do yourself.

April 26, 2020 · 16 min · 3343 words · Shane Caldwell