Baseten(@baseten):Research has always been core to Baseten, from training to model performance and beyond. Charlie, who leads part of our training team, sat down with Madison to talk about what it takes to be an AI researcher, from his PhD at Oxford to founding a company dedicated to post-training (and joining Baseten!)

2026.07.14 18:24

Research has always been core to Baseten, from training to model performance and beyond. Charlie, who leads part of our training team, sat down with Madison to talk about what it takes to be an AI researcher, from his PhD at Oxford to founding a company dedicated to post-training (and joining Baseten!)

Madison Kanna@Madisonkanna

2026.07.14 16:25

How to become an AI researcher with @oneill_c Charlie co-founded Parsed to build specialized open-source models that can outperform frontier labs. I first met Charlie when Parsed was acquired by Baseten, and now he leads our model development team. Charlie is one of the smartest people I know, and I had the pleasure of talking to him about: 0:00 Intro 3:13 Leaving Oxford to start a company 6:37 Becoming an AI researcher 15:37 Developing a unique POV as your moat 22:04 Parsed origin story 26:01 Big Token, the case for open-source models 33:40 Post-training, fine-tuning, specialization 46:52 Will open models catch up with closed models? 51:50 AI-led job replacement vs job creation 54:45 How to get into inference engineering This is one of my favorite conversations I’ve had in a long time. Made with @ad0rnai behind the scenes. Enjoy!