Open-Source AI & Open Models Reading List
How to get up to speed on open models and their implications.
Tech
Interconnects.
Nathan Lambert on AI research from inside frontier labs, minus the hype.
Recent essays
30 of 54One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire
Some quick notes on a truly weird week.
When will average people feel AI’s impact?
We’re <5 years into a compounding revolution which could take a century, and how the AI industry should manage this.
Latest open artifacts (#24): Motif-3, GLM-5.3, Hy4-preview and open model licenses
The open model ecosystem continues to expand in its breadth
Teaching Everyone to Fish for Tokens
Nvidia wants you building your own model, not buying from Anthropic/OpenAI.
GLM-5.3: How Chinese labs keep stride with the frontier
Hint: It’s really not a distillation story.
I wrote an AI textbook — how long until AI can do it better?
Reflections on AI's writing ability and how AI models get more capable.
5 useful things you'll learn in my new post-training textbook (shipping now!)
After a few long years of finding time to document my lessons from training open models, my post-training book is done!
Lessons from the hacks
Musings on model alignment, what determines safety, and where we go from here.
Introducing our Artifacts Hub and Adoption Dashboard
Scaling our curation and measurement of the open ecosystem.
Latest open artifacts (#23): Laguna S2.1, Inkling, & Kimi K3 show the utility of open models on the Pareto frontier
Capacity to train strong models is proliferating.
Open models recap: more on Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, Xi's WAIC speech, distillation, the open-closed gap, and what's next
A podcast with Florian Brand.
Kimi K3: The open-weights escalation
The global implications on the AI ecosystem.
6 months to live for open models
The most serious test to date of open source AI’s viability is happening right now.
Latest open artifacts (#22): Zyphra, Cohere, and Poolside are expanding the breadth of the ecosystem
An assessment of the open ecosystem and the motivations behind releasing models
GLM-5.2 is the step change for open agents
A capability threshold I've been carefully monitoring.
Banning Open Source AI Would Be A Mistake
This post was originally an op-ed co-authored with Kevin Xu of Interconnected for a general, non-technical audience.
State of the blog, mid-2026
About 3 years since I started writing weekly.
Frontier post-training recipe review with Finbarr Timbers
"Interview" #18
Welcome to the AGI era of AI governance
It's a one-way door and we weren't ready for it.
Claude Fable 5 and new AI safety fables
One step further into the power politics of frontier AI systems.
Farewell Ai2
This was my last week at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), where I got the great privilege to work on the Olmo models, to grow, to learn, and to have broad lasting impacts.
Open and closed models are on different exponentials
Where marginally higher intelligence drives value, and where it doesn't.
Some ideas for what comes next, May 2026
Gemini Flash 3.5, Mythos, open-closed balance, America's open-source surge, emerging power struggles and more.
Latest open artifacts (#21): Open model bonanza! Gemma 4, DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6, MiMo 2.5, GLM-5.1 & others. On CAISI's V4 assessment.
An eventful month with one flagship release after another
How open model ecosystems compound
Further reflections on China's high-participation, open-first AI ecosystem.
Notes from inside China's AI labs
Lessons from my trip to talk to most of the leading AI labs in China.
The distillation panic
‘Distillation attacks’ is a horrible term for what is happening right now.
Reading today's open-closed performance gap
The complex factors that determine the single evaluation number so many focus on. Plus, how this changes in the future.
My bets on open models, mid-2026
What I expect to come next and why, focused on the open-closed gap.