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

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. In practice, this will mean publishing the details of experiments so that outside scientists can study and replicate them.

Lambert says the way frontier AI labs keep their work secret reduces the community’s ability to scrutinize ideas and contribute new approaches. He believes that letting outside experts see how models are built and tuned could be crucial to mitigating risks.

“Over the past few millennia, humanity has had the scientific method in our toolbox as a way to mitigate harms and build better futures,” Lambert tells WIRED. “The current closed trajectory of frontier AI development is taking us a step backwards.”

The world’s most powerful models, like those from OpenAI and Anthropic, can only be accessed through an app or an application programming interface (API). Often, this comes at the cost of transparency about how the model is built and how it behaves.

Other companies, especially those in China, offer relatively powerful models that can be downloaded and run on a user’s own hardware. The Chinese company Xiaomi, for example, recently published live details of a major training run involving one of its models. And researchers at Stanford are pretraining the AI model Marin in the open.

“I'm a massive fan of much more transparency than we currently have in R&D,” Tim Fist, director of emerging technology policy at the Institute for Progress, a policy thinktank, tells WIRED.