Lambert and Zick launch nonprofit Trillium Labs to study self-improvement in the open
High-risk AI research goes transparent; whether outside scientists can actually replicate frontier experiments depends on compute and disclosed detail.
Nathan Lambert and Tom Zick launched a nonprofit, Trillium Labs, on October 2 to work on areas frontier labs typically keep closed.
The initial focus includes recursive self-improvement (RSI, a process where AI contributes to developing new models, with a stated risk of losing human control) and post-training fine-tuning. The plan is to publish experiment details so outside scientists can study and replicate them. Lambert previously worked at Ai2 and Hugging Face and has long pushed for open models; Zick worked at Harvard and helped Charles Schwab devise responsible-AI policies.
On funding, the lab has raised an undisclosed sum from Schmidt Sciences, Halcyon Futures and others; the founders say they aim to raise $40 to $100 million in total and plan to spend $30 million on training over the next 18 months. The lab has no published results yet, so the commitments remain to be seen.
Sources:https://trilliumlabs.org/https://www.wired.com/story/trillium-labs-wants-to-do-high-risk-ai-research-in-the-open