Banning Open Source AI Would Be A Mistake A general audience PSA with Kevin Xu of Interconnected, while AI regulation is in the air in DC www.interconnects.ai/p/banning-op...
Nathan Lambert
Post-training researcher at Ai2, writes Interconnects
Articles & links
The geopolitical angle of the AI race is only going to keep accelerating. More domestic talent travel restrictions from the Chinese government. I expect more and more things like this, AI is getting embedded in the core of existing power structures. www.bloomberg.com/news/arti…
GLM-5.2 is the step change for open agents. Aka GLM-5.2 is the “DeepSeek moment” for agents. We enter a new world where the top end of agentic capabilities are available in open models. www.interconnects.ai/p/glm-52-is-...
Why I think Anthropic's uneven safety policies with the release of Claude Fable 5 undermine the broader AI community's cohesion and accelerate us to more uncertainty and risk in AI's near-term evolution. www.interconnects.ai/p/claude-fab...
Some ideas for what comes next, May 2026 Gemini Flash 3.5, Mythos, open-closed balance, America's open-source surge, emerging power struggles and more. www.interconnects.ai/p/some-ideas...
My time at Ai2 / @ai2.bsky.social has come to an end. Ai2 is a wonderful place. The last 2.5+ years building Olmo, Tulu, and other projects will be one of the peaks of my entire career. www.interconnects.ai/p/farewell-ai2
Welcome to the AGI era of AI governance It's a one-way door and we weren't ready for it. Especially the open-source community celebrating Anthropic's downfall isn't ready for when it's their turn in court. www.interconnects.ai/p/welcome-to...
All the models, datasets, and even intermediate RL rollouts are released: huggingface.co/collections/... It's a great paper, I'm stoked to have a small part in it!
- Allen AI released Tmax, an open recipe for terminal agents at 2B, 9B, and 27B parameters, with code, data, and checkpoints public.
- Tmax-9B hits 27.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, called the strongest open-weights result under 10B parameters under official settings.
- The release bundles TMax-15k, a 14,600-environment RL dataset described as over 2.5 times larger than any prior open terminal-agent dataset.
Latest open artifacts (#21): Open model bonanza! Gemma 4, DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6, MiMo 2.5, GLM-5.1 & others. On CAISI's V4 assessment. An eventful month with one flagship release after another www.interconnects.ai/p/latest-ope...
Can closed labs can create margins with very high cost services in the long-term? I say yes, but only in a few niches like high end knowledge work. Meanwhile, the open model economy slowly grows to be bigger and control the long-tail of AI use. www.interconnects.ai/p/open-and-…
I wrote a little state of the union on the state of Interconnects, how I ended up with a loyal niche audience, and how I’m tweaking operations to ensure the long-term success here! Thanks for the support everyone. 💚
www.interconnects.ai/p/artifacts-... Artifacts 22: Zyphra, Cohere, Poolside, and others are expanding the breadth and diversity of the ecosystem. In this issue, a total of 30 models from may/june you should be aware of, from: NVIDIA (3) Cohere (2) Zhipu AI Zyphra (3) Poolside …
Recent commentary
Anthropic's political pressure on distillation is regulatory capture and most of the employees are blind to it under their veil of safety. Or their paycheck helped them buy into safety, is only human nature, I don't even fault them that much.
Being out of SF has lowered my information proximity but with the big upside of giving me space to cultivate my own beliefs and values around ai. We need more people zagging in AI, the monoculture just helps the incumbents win at this point.
It's been a great effort by the early and growing American open-model labs since last June to put the US much more back on the map. We were getting totally owned last June. Nvidia, Ai2, Arcee, Gemma, GPT-OSS and a few others will be seen as saving American open AI.
On-policy distillation is on track to be a lasting method in post-training. The list of areas would be: Instruction tuning (SFT/IFT) RLHF Direct Preference Optimization (DPO et al) RLVR On-policy Distillation (OPD) New classes of methods are rare! Excited to play.
In Nathan Lambert's orbit
Center = Nathan Lambert. Left = members they follow (green edges). Right = members who follow them (blue edges). Top = mutual follows (orange edges, slightly larger). Drag any node to reposition; click to open that profile.