Nathan Lambert
AI alignment & RLHF
AI researcher, formerly at Hugging Face. Writes the Interconnects newsletter on AI alignment and RLHF.
Recent activity
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Nathan and Florian discuss the recent release of Kimi K3, a Chinese open model, and its performance gap to the US-based models, with some benchmarks suggesting it's 2-6 months behind. They also touch on Qwen's announcement of an open-weight model, Xi's commitment to openness and open-source, and the growing trend of distillation and fine-tuning in the open model ecosystem. AI summary
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Moonshot AI's release of Kimi K3, a 2.8T parameter model, has narrowed the performance gap between open and closed models from 6-9 months to 3-5 months, with Kimi K3 being the strongest open model ever released, rivaling the performance of closed models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind. The model's success suggests that Chinese companies are capable of building high-quality models without relying on IP theft, and Moonshot AI's approach is more extreme than previously thought. The open weights release of Kimi K3 will likely have significant implications for the AI ecosystem, including increased competition and a need for coordination as powerful technologies are rolled out globally. AI summary
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The most serious test to date of open source AI’s viability is happening right now.
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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
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Z.ai's GLM-5.2 model has crossed a significant user experience threshold, offering a step change in performance and capabilities, particularly in open agent applications, and has gained widespread praise from the AI community. The model's release has accelerated the development of open-weight models, with GLM-5.2 being the first to offer credible alternatives to Anthropic's closed models, and is poised to drive further adoption and innovation in the field. This marks a significant milestone in the evolution of open-source AI models. AI summary
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Banning open source AI would be a grave mistake as it drives economic growth, promotes education, innovation, and competition, and is inherently secure and transparent. Over 90% of the world's software is built on open source, producing over $8 trillion in economic benefits, and open source AI is quietly improving and securing AI models everywhere. The US government's recent actions to regulate AI could inadvertently or intentionally ban open source, which would have unintended consequences, particularly for startups and educational institutions that rely on it. AI summary
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About 3 years since I started writing weekly.
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Finbarr Timbers discusses the evolution of post-training recipes in large language models, highlighting the shift from a single pipeline to multi-stage recipes with the emergence of Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD) in 2026 models such as MiMo Flash V2 and Nemotron 3 Ultra. MOPD involves training multiple domain-specialist teachers and distilling their knowledge into a single student using on-policy distillation. This approach enables scalability and flexibility in post-training, addressing the limitations of traditional methods. AI summary
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It's a one-way door and we weren't ready for it.
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Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 model, a general-access variant of their Mythos-class models, has been released with new safety measures, including a classifier system that detects potential misuse and prevents the model from responding in certain situations. The model's capabilities have significantly improved, with benchmark scores surpassing those of current Opus models, and it is considered the smartest model available to the general public. However, the safety measures introduced by Anthropic have raised concerns about the uneven application of safety policies, potentially leading to a classic cautionary fable in the field of AI. AI summary
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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.
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