These AI Experts Want to Do High-Stakes Research Out in the Open

Many frontier labs keep their risky research locked away. Trillium Labs wants to show off its work when it comes to self-improvement and model behavior. Some big AI companies seem to think that the best way to keep models from becoming too chaotic or too mischievous is to keep them locked inside of labs. If only a chosen few can access them, the thinking goes, they can do less damage in the real world while researchers try to understand what they're capable of. Nathan Lambert and Tom Zick, two industry scientists, believe the opposite. The pair founded a nonprofit, Trillium Labs, that will work on various areas of AI research--including potentially problematic areas like recursive self-improvement (RSI) and agents--in a more transparent way.