How big is the open model economy today?
Our first open model economy research note for paid subscribers.
Tech
Interconnects.
Nathan Lambert on AI research from inside frontier labs, minus the hype.
Recent essays
30 of 65Was I wrong about open models & cyber risks?
Last week coined the term “Black October“ after an onslaught of critical vulnerability disclosures, including PHP2Shell and a long-standing GitLab bug, signified the moment when the cyber risks of AI models started to materialize.
Artificial Analysis v5 and the benchmarker's dilemma
A sort of review of the benchmarking industry and what's missing.
Podcast: Kimi K3.1 Pro, the new cyber reality, and Muse musings
#20
Latest open artifacts (#25): DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, American-made models, and new regulatory controls in the US & China
Western open models strike back
Meta shakes up the frontiers, open and closed
US open weights are back!
I expect rapid progress but not towards general superintelligence
I’ve often been surprised when I hear from top researchers in industry that they think AI will be better than them at their job in a few years, and I didn’t really know why I doubted it.
The Cyber Risk Discourse is Broken
Open-weights, ideology, and acknowledging trade-offs.
Debating RSI, the US-China Gap, and Jaggedness with JS Denain of Epoch AI
Podcast #19
The current balance of power in open models
The expanded form of a testimony I prepared for Congress.
Why I still haven’t bought into true RSI
An “AI moderate’s” view on recent events and the trajectory of frontier models.
Open-Source AI & Open Models Reading List
How to get up to speed on open models and their implications.
One 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