U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative (genesisopenmodels.anl.gov)
157 points by moelf 6 hours ago
firasd 4 hours ago
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
ipsum2 4 hours ago
There's a bunch of American open models. Inkling, Nemotron, Trinity come to mind, but I'm sure there's others.
embedding-shape 3 hours ago
Laguna S 2.1 is really great too, in the "preview" release they've done so far at least. Still pending some reasoning-looping, but besides that, it's a really strong model to run within 96GB VRAM with the NVFP4 variants, and it's really good at coding (specifically).
walrus01 3 hours ago
behnamoh 3 hours ago
kadoban 3 hours ago
firasd 4 hours ago
Just looked into some Nemotron stats
Looks like on <https://arena.ai> agent arena (grouped by lab) Nvidia is 15/15 (much worse than Thinky and Mistral) and on text arena it's 18/27
On <https://openrouter.ai/models?order=most-popular> I definitely see usage though (probably mostly cause Nemotron 3 Ultra is free) the grouped order is DeepSeek, Tencent, Xiaomi, OpenAI, Z.ai, Nvidia
coder543 3 hours ago
no-name-here 28 minutes ago
written-beyond 4 hours ago
Don't forget IBM
loeg 4 hours ago
I would not be shocked if another open model eventually shakes out of Facebook (based on Zuckerberg's public remarks).
solomatov 4 hours ago
Which remarks? Could you share a link?
loeg 2 hours ago
wmf 4 hours ago
Also Nemotron and Arcee.
walrus01 3 hours ago
Laguna is the most recent and capable one that comes to mind. In its size class it is not as "smart" in my experience as qwen 3.5 122 or DeepSeek v4 flash 0731 (all at q8), but it's also not terrible.
mistrial9 4 hours ago
review of AllenAI Olmo research team and commitment to OSS -- AI2 complete transparency including training data, code, intermediate checkpoints, and detailed logs for reproducibility and scientific rigor.
logicallee 2 hours ago
I've used Inkling a lot recently, it's an American open model and is really good!
connorbrinton 3 hours ago
Laguna S 2.1 is another fairly impressive-for-the-size American open model
lithobraking 21 minutes ago
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...
Aeroi 2 hours ago
andsoitis 3 hours ago
Does Europe have an equivalent program?
shakna 3 hours ago
As part of a much larger series of initiatives towards digital sovereignty, yes. [0]
[0] https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/strengtheni...
andsoitis 2 hours ago
Oh. Being buried in hierarchy does not inspire hope.
godwinson__4-8 an hour ago
an0malous 3 hours ago
Do all these models have any significant architectural differences or training data sources? What are the factors going into the diversity of their performance?
ux266478 3 hours ago
The article posted is basically entirely about that.
Smith42 4 hours ago
What would the selected participants get from this? Looks like there is no offer of funding?
datlife 3 hours ago
This is refreshing considering all the FUD (mostly from 1 frontier lab) happening around Open weight models.
no-name-here 27 minutes ago
What is the FUD happening from 1 frontier lab?
yewenjie 5 hours ago
I couldn't find any details about size or training data for the model.
robotbikes 4 hours ago
It looks like they're taking applications for training data (due August 14th), so I think it's safe to say this is just an announcement of intent and a call for involvement vs. something that is readily available. Seems almost quaint in comparison to the strategy of sucking up every piece of data you can find anywhere on the Internet and feeding it to your LLM but I suspect their intent is to be more careful in what they train their model on.
villish 3 hours ago
I have no doubt companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google will rush to give them all the data they want in order to keep those government contracts flowing.
andsoitis 3 hours ago
I wonder why it took so long.
dmix 3 hours ago
Mostly because it's generally a bad idea for government to try to compete with a brand new tech industry with hundreds of billions in private capital developing commercial models. If the American private industry does actually wash out vs Chinese open models there might be talent available for them to put money into, so maybe they are just preparing for that scenario in the meantime.
anon373839 29 minutes ago
Commoditizing AI models serves the interests of just about everybody except for a relative handful of people in San Francisco. The more decentralized control of the technology is, the more its benefits can be realized by businesses and individuals rather than becoming a black hole of monopolistic rent seeking.
baron3dl 2 hours ago
we're about witness the realization that "here's a tech that can make us a whole bunch of money" is actually "here's tech that will establish the next hegemony." american companies may compete with chinese companies on the former. only the USG can compete with the PRC on the former.
MangoCoffee 3 hours ago
The American attitude is generally to let private companies build up a new industry so it can create jobs and pay taxes. However, in the LLM race, the Chinese open weight playbook pretty much killed that. China has basically commoditized LLMs. Chinese models are good enough, so the race has come down to who can offer the cheapest tokens.
andsoitis 2 hours ago
Thegn 4 hours ago
“Gomi” is the Japanese word for garbage. Gotta wonder if someone has a sense of humor…
greggsy 3 hours ago
The Australian Liberal Party (basically our version of conservative republicans) proposed the National Energy Guarantee policy in 2017, which inevitably failed due to the media and public’s relative literacy and tendency to turn policy names into acronyms.
thegreatpeter 4 hours ago
Pretty cool I’ll take it. Thanks!
logicallee 2 hours ago
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.
1123581321 an hour ago
Can you explain the screenshot a little more? It just looks like you’re comparing the output of a chatbot and Claude Code about a log file. If it’s a metaphor, it went over my head, sorry!
monkpit 42 minutes ago
Is this a joke? I don’t get it. Are you calling Rovo a DoE programmer?
logicallee 2 minutes ago
a portion of the Jira comment was added by a DoE partner, yes. Not Rovo. We don't use Rovo.
riffic 3 hours ago
stewards of the nuclear weapons biz. they'll do great here.
shenenee 3 hours ago
Genesis is skynet
placedrock 3 hours ago
Modeling with my life as data.