Report: “Nathan Lambert’s ATOM Project Seeks American Open Source AI Models”

From The New Stack:

On the 4th of July, Nathan Lambert launched “The American DeepSeek Project,” a plan to counter the open-weight AI large language models (LLMs) from China’s DeepSeek with support for an American “fully open source model at the scale and performance of current (publicly available) frontier models, within two years.”

It’s an issue dear to his heart. Lambert is a former Hugging Face research scientist (who’s also worked at Google DeepMind and Facebook AI Research), and is now a post-training lead at the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). “I want to do this at Ai2,” Lambert wrote on his blog, “but it takes far more than just us to make it happen. We need advocates, peers, advisors, and compute.”

“Our strategy was never to seek broad public support,” Lambert told TNS in an email interview last week, “but instead to target key people in the AI/ML [machine learning] community. We’ve had numerous professors, founders and influential voices in AI sign on, as well as some surprises like OpenAI C-suite executives. We’ve also spoken to some key DC policy makers.” (“There are many avenues to obtain and allocate these resources across multiple stakeholders,” the site explains, including private companies, philanthropic institutions, government agencies, private sector partnerships, “and potentially new public-private partnership models, similar to how other critical national infrastructure projects are funded.”)

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Lambert said his goals are similar to the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot, led by the U.S. National Science Foundation and 12 other federal agencies and 26 nongovernmental partners to “make available government-funded, industry and other contributed resources in support of the nation’s research and education community.”

But Lambert said his project remains “focused on building the right kind of models; we believe very deeply that not all ‘open’ models are created equally, and we need to make sure that not only the caliber of models made in America match the foreign alternatives, but also that the decisions made to have fully open models are being respected.

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