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Nathan Lambert

@natolambert.bsky.social
15K followers 278 following 2.2K posts

A LLN - large language Nathan - (RL, RLHF, society, robotics), athlete, yogi, chef Writes interconnects.ai Prev Ai2/Olmo, HuggingFace, Berkeley, and normal places

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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 7h
In case you missed my hot take yesterday. www.interconnects.ai/p/the-cyber-...
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Too many people are analyzing the cyber risks of open models in a narrow lens, assuming China doesn't care about safety, and fear mongering about private information on open-weight cyber attacks. The public information we have paints a very different picture. www.interconnects.ai/p/the-cyber-...
interconnects.ai
The Cyber Risk Discourse is Broken
Open-weights, ideology, and acknowledging trade-offs.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Reflection joins the list of Nvidia and Thinking Machines who have tried to release their strongest models and come up behind Chinese counterparts. There's a lot of ways people will overthink this, but the clearest takeaway should be that the Chinese are very very good at building LLMs.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
It distracts from how so much of AI risks is simply coming from diffusing what we have, and we should invest in preparedness, pushing the labs to be more careful, etc. Change my mind?
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I think pacing the frontier is good as an idea in principle but dead on arrival as something you can actually do. What will we, decide which benchmarks we can improve on? Who is involved? If we stop pushing "capabilities" we'll do a ton of research on swarms&efficiency which will bring other risks
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
At Trillium Labs, the recipes will be the slow nutrients for the seasons and the model releases will be the blooms. Building an institution dedicated to this is needed because, much as nature’s trilliums are slow to expand and grow, the open-ecosystem needs time and dedicated resources to catch up.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Trilliums are wildflowers that bloom briefly in the spring, before the forest canopies fill out. Though they are small, they lay the foundation for the cycles of growth and nourishment through the rest of the year.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
We're built around the theory of change that you need more eyes to solve hard technical problems. We have faith in the scientific methods and communities that humanity has built, and worry that AI is becoming too closed to utilize them.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Today we're unveiling Trillium Labs, a new non-profit to foster the open science of frontier AI. We're building open post-training recipes and will expand into open infra to study RSI, reward-hacking, multi-agent systems, and whatever comes next. blog.trilliumlabs.org/p/introducin...
blog.trilliumlabs.org
Introducing Trillium Labs
Fostering the open science of frontier AI.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Read about the group here: www.schmidtsciences.org/ai2050-fello...
schmidtsciences.org
Schmidt Sciences Names 28 AI2050 Fellows Tackling the Defining AI Challenges of Our Time - Schmidt Sciences
Supported by up to $16 million over three years, the fifth cohort of 28 AI2050 Fellows will address the most important long-term problems in AI which need to be solved for AI to be truly beneficial…
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I'll have more to share soon, but it's important to have groups like this who are the independent thinkers at the cutting edge of the technology. Support like this has helped me take more personal career risk to do what I think is most urgently needed today.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Excited to be in the 2026 early-career cohort of the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 fellowship. I'm thankful to have continued support of my work building and understanding the open ecosystem, so future AI is accessible, diffused widely, controlled by many, and safe.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Love to see Google surprising people with Gemini 4. More labs at the frontier is wonderful for consumers (competition) and the world (reduction in concentration of power). Excited to see how it goes in real-world scenarios.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
dashboard.interconnects.ai/extra#infere...
dashboard.interconnects.ai
Open Models Dashboard
Daily-updated Hugging Face downloads and derivatives of open-weight AI models — USA vs China vs EU.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The latest Interconnects plot - showing the exponential growth of the open model inference economy. Plot is showing the daily tokens processed by the leading companies, based on public disclosures (for Together, Baseten, and Fireworks) and the OpenRouter API. I underestimated OpenRouter's growth.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This is an excellent report on why full RSI / an intelligence explosion is fighting diminishing returns on many fronts, and not yet showing signs of happening. Really recommend reading. I wish I wrote it. While I agree with it, it could end up being wrong! www.noahpinion.blog/p/wheres-the...
noahpinion.blog
Where’s the “intelligence explosion”?
Ramez Naam gives a skeptic’s take on Recursive Self-Improvement.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Fairly easy actions I use to reduce phone addiction: 1. Never bring phone in the bedroom 2. If going out to a meal walking distance from home, leave phone behind 3. Black and white mode toggle on Home Screen 4. Silly one: move phone out of pockets I like to put my hands in
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Hearing AI regulation is in the air, especially with a misguided tone of “open dangerous, closed safe” so it felt timely to re-up this one. There are ways to make the AI industry safer without kneecapping transparency, education, and competition. www.interconnects.ai/p/banning-op...
interconnects.ai
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.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Debating RSI, the US-China Gap, and Jaggedness with JS Denain of Epoch AI Podcast #19 Substack: www.interconnects.ai/p/debating-r... YouTube: youtu.be/mE0__1EfVxw?...
interconnects.ai
Debating RSI, the US-China Gap, and Jaggedness with JS Denain of Epoch AI
Podcast #19
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Summary on the state of open models, reflecting on my Congressional testimony on the topic. From: www.interconnects.ai/p/the-curren...
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I was asked by Congressional staff to share my views on open models performance, adoption, and competition vis a vis China. Here’s my briefing with all our latest data and predictions for what comes next. www.interconnects.ai/p/the-curren...
interconnects.ai
The current balance of power in open models
The expanded form of a testimony I prepared for Congress.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
My best guess is that for scaled RL most of the top Chinese AI labs are starting to use a lot of Huawei for inference and Nvidia for training (maybe not for weird architectures). As agent swarms, even more scaled post-training, etc becomes the norm, this will accelerate their domestic industry.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Doesn’t apply to state actors, who will use this stuff, but for most of usage yeah I agree
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
from: www.interconnects.ai/p/where-i-st...
interconnects.ai
Where I stand on RSI
A moderate's view on the trajectory of AI.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
A big problem with the AI forecasting discourse is that people ask “when will AI replace X job?” When in reality, AI will slowly replace a bunch of the sub-skills needed to do the job, but rarely all of them.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Where I stand on RSI: A moderate's view on the recent events and trajectory of AI. I was underestimating how much we are likely to scale inference-time compute in the near future, but have not seen much to convince me that an intelligence explosion is near. www.interconnects.ai/p/where-i-st...
interconnects.ai
Where I stand on RSI
A moderate's view on the trajectory of AI.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Seems like one of the most important research problems for CS academics is llm-supervised peer review. If we don’t solve it the academic institutions are toast. It seems easier than building new institutions.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
This is lasting longer than I expected. The first incident like this from open-weight models will come soon, but many forecasted that these issues would be predominantly from open models, not the closed frontier labs.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
With the latest external hack of OpenAI via Claude, closed models continue to be the tip of the iceberg on AI risks, not open models. They have been 1) much easier to get started with, 2) more capable & 3) shipped with leaky safeguards. Finetuning open models to specific attacks is harder.
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Reposted by Nathan Lambert
Michael Noukhovitch @mnoukhov.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Is RL actually making your LLM better? Gains from RL are mostly on easy questions🤯 We're calling this the Matthew Effect for RL on LLMs. We then leverage async RL to solve harder problems by Never Giving Up! arxiv.org/abs/2609.13443 and mnoukhov.github.io/posts/ngu/ and check out thread below 🧵👇
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Michael’s nice blog post walking you through it: mnoukhov.github.io/posts/ngu/
mnoukhov.github.io
Michael Noukhovitch - Blog
This is a blog post for my recent paper on RL post-training of LLMs: introducing the Matthew Effect and proposing to solve it with Never Give Up. It is presented interactively and less formally, more…
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Called "Never Give Up," and we showed it can help make gains on harder problems in RL.Excited this paper is out (and surprised I haven't seen someone pursue this idea)! It's very nice because it seems intuitively very scalable, but it's not trivial to get it working in practice. Congrats to Michael
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
An basic idea in scaling RL: Can we allocate more compute to the harder problems? We did this: If your GRPO group has all wrong completions, sample more with probability P (~0.9) -- in search of more GRPO batches with nonzero gradient. It works! The paper: arxiv.org/abs/2609.13443
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Open-Source AI & Open Models Reading List How to get up to speed on open models and their implications. www.interconnects.ai/p/open-sourc...
interconnects.ai
Open-Source AI & Open Models Reading List
How to get up to speed on open models and their implications.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A great read. I have similar feelings about how AI labs approach progress directly and without nurturing of scientific communities & intuition. The math research community went through the transition the fastest, so it was felt most. Other fields next. terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a...
terrytao.wordpress.com
A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics
I am proud to be among the list of 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to the declaration below, which grew out of discussions between ourselves over the last week. We have…
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
i dont write with ai
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
yeah I can get behind that too. Appropriate amount of fear is >0 for sure.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Was spending too much time reading Tweets, so set out to write down why one resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire -- and importantly square which claims I think are valid or hyperbole in the resulting discourse. www.interconnects.ai/p/one-resign...
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
If you are looking for an alternate viewpoint today, which assumes AI models accelerate the process of AI research, but it doesn't result in rapid RSI and an explosion of near term risks: www.interconnects.ai/p/lossy-self...
interconnects.ai
Lossy self-improvement
The case for why self-improvement is real but it doesn't lead to fast takeoff.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
In light of kind of insane AI safety discussions recently: 1. AI progress is very fast 2. we should be careful about how we roll out the tech 3. the world is not actively ending
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
It's a common agreement among my friends not at OpenAI/Anthropic that people at the labs operate with a religious energy (Ant especially). It manifests very out of touch interactions, which carries into public comms here (e.g the recent quitting). Company cultures create this.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
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. www.interconnects.ai/p/when-will-...
interconnects.ai
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.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
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 The frontier labs continue to be enveloped in mass drama. www.interconnects.ai/p/latest-ope... artifactshub.ai?issue=24
interconnects.ai
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
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Haven’t run much this year but sent 22 miles in the mountains to check in on the engine and we still got it. End of a great vaca.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
OOO for a bit, time to celebrate & rest :)
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
More thoughts: natolambert.substack.com/p/how-many-a...
natolambert.substack.com
How many arXiv papers use various open LLMs
China’s slow and steady growth as the foundation of open research.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Check out our latest open model data -- which models are mentioned in every arXiv ML paper since ChatGPT. A very fun weekend project with Codex! From idea is full dataset in <72hours. ~500K papers processed 😎 Plot: dashboard.interconnects.ai?axrange=all#...
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
What's the best work you've consumed on open models, us v china AI, distillation, or related topics? Blogs, papers, videos, podcasts all welcome.
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Yes
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Personal milestone: 1000 true fans of my newsletter Interconnects! Hitting a very long term goal feels great. I’m happy to get to be an independent voice in AI. Cultivating a paid base helps me commit to that longer term, and scale Interconnects’ impact.
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