About — EleutherAI

EleutherAI is a non-profit AI research lab that focuses on interpretability and alignment of large models.

Founded in July 2020 by Connor Leahy, Sid Black, and Leo Gao, EleutherAI has grown from a Discord server for talking about GPT‑3 to a leading non-profit research institute focused on large-scale artificial intelligence research. Our work has historically focused on providing access to cutting‑edge AI technologies by training and releasing models, and promoting open science norms in Natural Language Processing. As public access to large-scale pre‑trained AI models has substantially improved, our focus is shifting to researching AI interpretability and alignment.

EleutherAI operates primarily through our public Discord server, where we discuss research in the field and coordinate our projects. We embrace an open and collaborative research model, and our discord server does not strongly differentiate between employees, volunteers, and collaborators at other institutions. However, our community specifically caters to researchers and research-level discussion, and we ask that people interested in learning about AI research primarily observe.

EleutherAI employs two dozen full and part‑time research staff, who work alongside a dozen or so regular volunteers and external collaborators.

Our Mission

The development of transformer-based language models, especially GPT-3, has supercharged interest in large-scale machine learning research. Unfortunately, due to the high costs and unusual skill set required to advance in the field, the world of large-scale AI research today is dominated by a few large technology companies and start-ups.

At EleutherAI, we believe that these technologies are both highly promising and potentially dangerous. However, we firmly do not believe that decisions about the future of these technologies should be restricted to the employees of a handful of companies that develop them for profit. Research into interpretability and alignment is of utmost importance for AI governance. As increasingly powerful machine learning systems are being developed and deployed, it is crucial that independent researchers are able to study them.

We therefore seek to:

advance research on interpretability and alignment of foundation models;
ensure that the ability to study foundation models is not restricted to a handful of companies;
educate people about the capabilities, limitations, and risks associated with these technologies.

Our Impact

We developed or helped develop many of the most powerful publicly available models in the world, including GPT‑J, GPT‑NeoX, BLOOM, VQGAN‑CLIP, Stable Diffusion, and OpenFold.
Our models have been downloaded over 25 million times, enabling cutting-edge research on interpretability, ethics, training dynamics, and more.
Our research has resulted in over 35 publications, including in top machine learning and natural language processing venues such as NeurIPS, ACL, ICLR, and FAccT.
We sponsor AI research and education efforts around the world, bringing access to and knowledge about recently developed technologies to people and places who otherwise wouldn’t have access to it.