Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 7hIn case you missed my hot take yesterday. www.interconnects.ai/p/the-cyber-... 412519
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 06/10/2026Too 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.aiThe Cyber Risk Discourse is BrokenOpen-weights, ideology, and acknowledging trade-offs. 0225
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 05/10/2026Reflection 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. 1818
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 03/10/2026It 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? 1130
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 03/10/2026I 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 3240
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 02/10/2026At 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. 2160
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Trilliums 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. 2190
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 02/10/2026We'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. 1140
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Today 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.orgIntroducing Trillium LabsFostering the open science of frontier AI. 917223
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Read about the group here: www.schmidtsciences.org/ai2050-fello...schmidtsciences.orgSchmidt Sciences Names 28 AI2050 Fellows Tackling the Defining AI Challenges of Our Time - Schmidt SciencesSupported 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… 040
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026I'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. 121
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Excited 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. 2260
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Love 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. 2510
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 30/09/2026dashboard.interconnects.ai/extra#infere...dashboard.interconnects.aiOpen Models DashboardDaily-updated Hugging Face downloads and derivatives of open-weight AI models — USA vs China vs EU. 090
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 30/09/2026The 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. 2261
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 28/09/2026This 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.blogWhere’s the “intelligence explosion”?Ramez Naam gives a skeptic’s take on Recursive Self-Improvement. 15010
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 27/09/2026Fairly 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 2300
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 25/09/2026Hearing 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.aiBanning Open Source AI Would Be A MistakeThis post was originally an op-ed co-authored with Kevin Xu of Interconnected for a general, non-technical audience. 4308
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 22/09/2026Debating 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.aiDebating RSI, the US-China Gap, and Jaggedness with JS Denain of Epoch AIPodcast #19 0102
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 21/09/2026Summary on the state of open models, reflecting on my Congressional testimony on the topic. From: www.interconnects.ai/p/the-curren... 0124
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 21/09/2026I 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.aiThe current balance of power in open modelsThe expanded form of a testimony I prepared for Congress. 0316
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 20/09/2026My 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. 1181
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 19/09/2026Doesn’t apply to state actors, who will use this stuff, but for most of usage yeah I agree 020
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 19/09/2026from: www.interconnects.ai/p/where-i-st...interconnects.aiWhere I stand on RSIA moderate's view on the trajectory of AI. 040
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 19/09/2026A 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. 4255
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 19/09/2026Where 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.aiWhere I stand on RSIA moderate's view on the trajectory of AI. 0277
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 19/09/2026Seems 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. 7302
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 18/09/2026This 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. 0100
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 18/09/2026With 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. 74312
Reposted by Nathan LambertMichael Noukhovitch @mnoukhov.bsky.social · 15/09/2026Is 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 🧵👇 1267
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 15/09/2026Michael’s nice blog post walking you through it: mnoukhov.github.io/posts/ngu/mnoukhov.github.ioMichael Noukhovitch - BlogThis 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… 0101
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 15/09/2026Called "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 180
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 15/09/2026An 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 1598
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 13/09/2026Open-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.aiOpen-Source AI & Open Models Reading ListHow to get up to speed on open models and their implications. 1414
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 11/09/2026A 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.comA Severe Misalignment of AI in MathematicsI 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… 44515
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 11/09/2026yeah I can get behind that too. Appropriate amount of fear is >0 for sure. 060
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 10/09/2026Was 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... 1153
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 10/09/2026If 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.aiLossy self-improvementThe case for why self-improvement is real but it doesn't lead to fast takeoff. 37011
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 09/09/2026In 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 815514
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 09/09/2026It'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. 1283
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 09/09/2026When 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.aiWhen 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. 2161
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 08/09/2026Latest 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=24interconnects.aiLatest open artifacts (#24): Motif-3, GLM-5.3, Hy4-preview and open model licensesThe open model ecosystem continues to expand in its breadth 1130
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 06/09/2026Haven’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. 0290
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 24/08/2026More thoughts: natolambert.substack.com/p/how-many-a...natolambert.substack.comHow many arXiv papers use various open LLMsChina’s slow and steady growth as the foundation of open research. 142
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 24/08/2026Check 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#... 5317
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 21/08/2026What's the best work you've consumed on open models, us v china AI, distillation, or related topics? Blogs, papers, videos, podcasts all welcome. 4122
Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 17/08/2026Personal 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. 1460