Farewell Ai2
Interconnects · Nathan Lambert · 2026-06-02
Nathan Lambert announces his departure from the Allen Institute for AI, reflecting on his contributions to the OLMo open-source model series and arguing that independent open-science researchers are irreplaceable as AI knowledge consolidates inside closed frontier labs.
Extraction
Topics: open-scienceai-research-cultureolmopost-trainingrlhf
Claims
- Nathan Lambert is departing Ai2 after contributing to OLMo, Tülu 2, Tülu 3, and other open post-training research projects over roughly two and a half years.
- Lambert's Tülu 3 paper coined the term 'Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards' (RLVR) in fall 2024.
- The migration of prominent researchers into closed industry labs is creating a dangerous vacuum in independent, publicly oriented AI science.
- Open research will remain the standard that sets the language for understanding AI and trains the next generation, even as it falls further behind frontier labs on performance.
- Lambert plans to continue working on open post-training recipes and the ecological diversity of open models after leaving Ai2.
Key quotes
AI needs independent voices as it only becomes more geopolitical, socially disruptive, and central to the economy.
Open research will always be the standard that sets the language people use to understand AI. It'll always be how the next generation is trained – even if it's behind what industry has built.
When you write a plan that is feasible, the world bends towards that plan. When you convince people it's going to happen it only becomes more likely. Vision and compelling explanations are one of the items in shortest supply in the tech industry.