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 around the theory of change 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.

Over the weekend I had Codex parse 500K arXiv AI/ML papers since ChatGPT to understand which open models are used for research. In 2024, ~30% of papers mentioned an American open model and only 10% a Chinese model. Today, ~40% of papers mention a Chinese (open) LLM, and only 25-30% an American one. Chinese models are the default for research. Chinese mentions are still growing while American open models are stagnating. When looking at this data it's important to remember that papers substantially lag model releases, as research takes a long time. Qwen's steady growth is reflective of this, but so is Llama's lasting power. Some more observations: 1. Qwen has been steadily growing, and today 1/3 of papers which mention any LLM mention qwen. OpenAI's closed models are the highest overall, at ~37%. 2. Llama peaked around April of 2025 at 30% of papers which mention any LLM (including ChatGPT etc). Llama 4 was released at about the same time, and Llama has been declining since. 3. Gemini and Claude are less common than the leading open models, mentioned in 10-15% of papers puts them behind all of Qwen, Llama, and DeepSeek. Open models should be and are the foundations of open research. The % of papers mentioning any LLM have been steadily climbing since 2023. | Year | January | April | July | October | | 2023 | 10.43% | 15.39% | 18.69% | 32.18% | | 2024 | 29.70% | 33.93% | 35.70% | 44.25% | | 2025 | 39.23% | 45.28% | 44.94% | 53.52% | | 2026 | 55.49% | 57.26% | 53.14% | TBD Now over 50% of AI papers, from 10% in 2023. Other notes: - Gemma and Mistral hover around 5-10%. - Our beloved fully-open Olmo models have been ~1% since the first release in Jan. 2024. - DeepSeek has a clear jump after R1 in Jan. 2025 - Data derived from the most popular ML arXiv categories: cs. AI, cs. CL, cs. CV, cs. LG, stat. ML Just like our downloads and derivative model data, this is updated daily on the Interconnects Open Model Dashboard.