U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

Just realized that there are basically no American open models right now ever since the Llama series was abandoned. Basically Gemma and GPT-OSS I guess?

Ah but Mira Murati's new Inkling is Apache 2.0

But it makes sense that if you're a university researcher you are thinking about what's a model that will be open weight and developed over the long term and doesn't raise 'Chyna' concerns in Washington DC

I'm interested to see where they want to land performance-wise (i.e. which point they choose on the scaling curve) and the niche they want to carve. They have a decent ways to scale beyond trinity large, in paticular on posttrain/RL before they are competitive with open-weights, especially internationally.

Deepseek is explicitly banned [1] at LLNL and I wouldn't be suprised if there's a blanket ban on all Chinese models. But nowadays models like tera/luna could fill this area of the pareto front, and LANL already runs openai models on their clusters [2]. Maybe it's in custom SFT/RL, for instrument control or sensitive topics? But you'll still have to compete with frontier models + a harness.

I would have also liked to see a carrot tied to their offer. It'll be hard to get teams to contribute RL gyms or curated text. But throw in a "we'll fund a postdoc/student to do that" and I think you'd have teams scrambling to apply.

[1] https://hpc.llnl.gov/about-livermore-computing/ai-ml-lc/lc-l...

[2] https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/articles/nnsas-los-alamos-nation...

Does Europe have an equivalent program?

Do all these models have any significant architectural differences or training data sources? What are the factors going into the diversity of their performance?

What would the selected participants get from this? Looks like there is no offer of funding?

This is refreshing considering all the FUD (mostly from 1 frontier lab) happening around Open weight models.

I couldn't find any details about size or training data for the model.

I wonder why it took so long.

“Gomi” is the Japanese word for garbage. Gotta wonder if someone has a sense of humor…

Pretty cool I’ll take it. Thanks!

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I've had an extremely bad experience working with Department of Energy affiliated programmers in AI. By my invitation, they are part of our workflow and act as humans in the loop, but they have extremely bad habits of gaslighting and accusing people of schizophrenia rather than getting work done.

Here's an example[1] of the difference between what a U.S. Department of Energy employee adds to a ticket versus a private industry AI completing instructions as assigned.

This isn't some cherry-picked example, it's just what I happen to be dealing with right at this moment, happened just a couple of moments ago.

[1] https://ibb.co/vCg2G1Dn

stewards of the nuclear weapons biz. they'll do great here.

Genesis is skynet

Modeling with my life as data.