Nathan Lambert

Nathan Lambert is the founder of a stealth, non-profit AI lab and writes Interconnects, a well read technical newsletter on AI models and research. He was recently a Research Scientist and post-training lead at the Allen Institute for AI focusing on building open language models. He works to increase transparency and understanding of current AI models and systems by building the open ecosystem.

Previously, he helped build an RLHF research team at HuggingFace. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley working at the intersection of machine learning and robotics. He was advised by Professor Kristofer Pister in the Berkeley Autonomous Microsystems Lab and Roberto Calandra at Meta AI Research. He was lucky to intern at Facebook AI and DeepMind during his Ph.D. Nathan was was awarded the UC Berkeley EECS Demetri Angelakos Memorial Achievement Award for Altruism for his efforts to better community norms.

AI2050 Project

Open AI models — where the model weights are publicly available for anyone to use and modify — are reshaping who can build with artificial intelligence.

But we don’t have good ways to measure this ecosystem: who is actually using these models, which ones succeed, and whether the ecosystem is healthy or fragile.

Lambert’s project builds that measurement science through the ATOM Project, producing an annual report on the state of open models — tracking adoption, specialization, and ecosystem health — to inform the funders, policymakers, and developers whose decisions shape whether open AI fulfills its potential.