When I feel intimidated learning new things, especially systems, I often think about “Fog of War” mapping in RTS games. A FoW map is obscured in darkness, only to be revealed as you explore, tile by tile, until the entire domain is visible.

On Friday, I filed an amicus in the OpenAI copyright cases. These cases are immensely important to the future of creativity and AI in the U.S., and of libraries along with them. I shared with the court my belief that AI systems have a key role to play in the next era of libraries’ stewardship of information, and that a ruling against fair use for AI training could severely limit their ability to foster access to knowledge.

Information generation is accelerating, stewardship considerations are compounding, and libraries rarely receive the support they need. At current rates, it will take 100s of years—if not a millennium—for libraries to extend digital access to the whole of their collections. At the same time, we are finding new meaning and value in information, putting increasing pressure on our institutions to catalog, preserve, and provide access to it. What we are asking of them as stewards of our common knowledge will require new tools to augment their already immense efforts.

AI systems allow libraries to process collections in new, accelerated, and increasingly deep ways—from OCR to classification and description, through to search and discovery. This work requires general-purpose models that can work across a wide range of materials, including those under copyright, and the ability for libraries to tune these models to their needs. This is the essence of our work at the Institutional Data Initiative, but it is only possible where the law permits it.

I believe we are on a path to what I define as “ubiquitous” knowledge access: the ubiquitous availability of all knowledge and the ability to near-instantaneously traverse all possible connections between all that is known. As with any mythical story of knowledge, this is not a vision guaranteed to be utopian, but I do believe it to be an empowered one primed for thriving.

The library community is fortunate enough to be a cord made of many strands. My vision of knowledge access, and the role AI plays in it, is not shared by all of them, and we are better for it. Diversity among libraries has always been a strength. The same is true for the courts and the wealth of amici filed in this case, many of which represent views contrary to mine.

Authors and other creatives are under immense pressure, and it is equally important that they receive full consideration from the courts so that their works receive all protections to which they are entitled. The process of doing so is likely to highlight where we need to consider other forms of legislation, remuneration, or incentives to ensure they, and society, continue to benefit from their work. We would do well to take note.

There are no sides here—only our collective society. I hope libraries are able to thrive in it, authors and other creatives along with them, and that AI contributes to finding a path that enables that thriving for us all. I am hopeful all of these things can be true.

You can read the full brief here: leppert.me/posts/openai-a…

This is a great idea from a great builder.

Please listen attentively while I describe my (dream / vibe-coded app) from last night.

We are entering an era where software releases are simply cached compute.

Also true for certain data releases, etc.

I wrote about this as “intellectual debt”

The Hidden Costs of Automated Thinking newyorker.com/tech/annals-of…

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 ange 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.

SHEIN puts a CAPTCHA in front of marketing-list unsubscribe. Wild.

AI seems to have ushered in a golden age of analogies.

The best way to prepare for all possible AI futures is to invest deeply in your human relationships.

This and the Elon/Altman AI generated videos are proof that committing to the bit is the lion’s share of projecting real presence.

It’s still a dream of mine to get featured on Surfstation and K10K.

Beginning to suspect that whole Guns N’ Roses tough guy thing was just a front.

Then again, maybe she was truly a dangerously sweet child of his.

Is no one at Apple left-handed

But does it work for lefties

The Institutional Data Initiative continues our work to increase the computational accessibility of the ~1M volumes in Insitutional Books. Today’s releases add access to 22M photos and illustrations as well as 1.9B annotated paragraphs. Dig in.

“you begin with an air of critical reasonableness, and promptly resort to the glib logic of a salesman”