Today we're unveiling Trillium Labs @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. We'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. Trilliums 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. At 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. I co-founded with with a long-time friend and collaborator Tom Zick (@thesezickbeats). We're hiring (full time + student collabs/interns), we're fundraising, and we're looking for compute. Please get in touch if you're interested in helping out. Offices based in the Bay Area and Cambridge MA, remote okay. I’m in the Bay Area until for The Curve and COLM to connect with people who are interested. We’re thankful to have initial support from Halcyon Futures and Schmidt Sciences with more funding en route to enable our ambitions of scaling. Our advisors @Thom_Wolf, @HannaHajishirzi, @gneubig and @ctnzr have been instrumental to building the ecosystem that exists today, and I’m stoked to get to keep working with them.

I think this’ll be my first MATS cohort I’m mentoring! I’ve met so many wonderful MATS alumni, excited to contribute.

The final lecture of my course is an intro to character training! This is a topic that I've been quietly very invested in for ~18 months, as it: * Has potential for high real world impact * Clearly used extensively at frontier labs * Almost no empirical literature exists * More accessible on academic compute This lecture covers what character training is, reviews model specs, constitutions, the differences, the motivations in real world events, some example research papers I like, and open questions in how it relates to post-training/model use generally. Hopefully this brings more people into the field (and reach out if you have questions). It is one of the more research-y chapters in my book, but one that I felt needed the reference. There is still so little, educational content on the topic online. 0:00 Intro 6:22 Part 1: Fundamentals — character, constitutions, and model specs 19:21 Part 2: Character training in practice 23:23 Part 3: Character elicitation without gradient steps 28:03 Part 4: Open questions (and the end of the course) 32:27 The course, complete Thanks for watching. No need to like and subscribe now that the course is done, you definitely wouldn't! h/t to @_maiush for leading the technical work I got to do in the space, and @zafstojano for investing a lot of attention at this book chapter.

Have been working on this a lot (much with @_maiush, but also growing at Ai2). Plan to make olmo 4 great. Some ref's Feb '25: Character training: Understanding and crafting a language model's personality - interconnects.ai/p/character… Nov '25: Opening the black box of character training - interconnects.ai/p/opening-t… Nov '25: Open Character Training: Shaping the Persona of AI Assistants through Constitutional AI - arxiv.org/abs/2511.01689 RLHF Book chapter on it: rlhfbook.com/c/17-product

These personalities are directly downstream of a specific character training. We released one of the first methodology papers for doing this to different personalities earlier this week :)