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What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been: EleutherAI One Year
Retrospective

A look back at the first year of EleutherAI.
July 7, 2021 * Connor Leahy, Eric Hallahan, Leo Gao, Stella Biderman
The shadowy hacker group Eleuther

The shadowy hacker group Eleuther as imagined by Janus

Table of Contents

  * From Humble Beginnings
      + The Tensorflow Days
      + The Pile
      + First Results
  * The Second Era of EleutherAI
      + GPT-Neo and GPT-J
      + An Explosion of BioML Research
      + The Revival of #art
          o The Underground Studio, #the-faraday-cage
  * Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Future of EleutherAI
      + Reflections

It's been a weird year.

That's hardly a rare sentiment for obvious reasons, but it was
definitely an especially weird year for a small group of AI
enthusiasts on a niche discord server. It's been one year since the
founding of EleutherAI (back then still called LibreAI). It both
feels like so much longer and like it was just yesterday.

We are humbled and exhilarated by just how far our little hobby
project has come. What started as a small little tinker project for a
few bored nerds has grown into a vibrant community and open source
project more successful than we could have ever imagined.

We worked hard, we struggled, but more than anything, we had fun, a
lot of fun. And we thought it would be fun to share some of our
history and best [DEL:memes:DEL] moments from this weird, weird year
for your entertainment.

This post is a light-hearted trip down memory lane, and a look ahead
for what might come next. We had a blast and we changed the world, we
hope for the better.

From Humble Beginnings#

The year is 2020, OpenAI has unveiled GPT-3, and the entire ML world
is unimpressed. Well, not entirely... One small group of indomitable
nerds still holds out against the scaling-deniers. And life is not
easy for the symbolicist who garrison the fortified echochambers of
Twitter...

One day, on Shawn Presser's Discord server, one man with a history of
getting into trouble building large models saw a paper that almost
made even larger model training seem possible.

And so he wrote:

[ea2d]
Daj2020-07-02
https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.16668
Hey guys lets give OpenAI a run for their money like the good ol'
days

And another replied:

[89c7]
bmk2020-07-02
@Daj this but unironically

And the rest was history!

Quickly, we began to hash out our plans for [DEL:world domination
:DEL] TPU necromancy. Connor still had access to a generous amount of
TPUs through TRC from his previous GPT-2 misadventures, and so a few
dedicated nerds wanted to see how far we could get with that. In all
honesty, we didn't actually expect to get very far, but it was the
height of a pandemic and we didn't exactly have anything better to
do.

After [DEL:spamming:DEL] liberally filling the text-AI related
channels of our gracious hosts, we decided that we should strike out
on our own. And so, on this very day one year ago, the "LibreAI"
discord server was founded. We luckily wised up and picked a much
cooler name shortly thereafter.

[ea2d]
Connor2020-07-28
So, seeing as the new name voting got us some great name suggestions
but not too much voting, we've decided on our new name:
EleutherAI
"Eleutheria" is ancient greek for "liberty", so I think the name is
very appropriate and has a cool ring to it, I hope you agree. Thanks
to @goolulusaurs for suggesting the name! We're in the process of
setting up social media/website/etc but it's not a priority atm so
don't expect anything too soon, though we might refactor the github a
bit.
P.S. Since #deleted-channel is no longer needed I will be deleting it
in the next few days. If there's anything from there you want to
archive, do so now.

No, there has never been a space in `EleutherAI'.

And so, EleutherAI was born!

Me: Mom can we get OpenAI.<br>Mom: No we have OpenAI at home<br>
OpenAI at home: EleutherAI

The Tensorflow Days#

[70f1]
Sid2020-07-12
Hey @gwern
Welcome to the tensorflow mesh wastelands

Armed with access to a truly irresponsible amount of TPU computing
power, we began our newly-christened GPT-Neo project to build our
very own large language model.

tpu go brrr

But we were faced with a terrible price to be paid: We had to use
TensorFlow to use our TPUs. Worse, the model sizes we were aiming at
were so huge, we had to use an even more obscure library, Mesh
TensorFlow, on top of it.

This was... not the easiest of things to do.

[70f1]
Sid2020-07-15
AGH I HATE THIS LIBRARY
mtf.rename_dimension() does a different thing to
tensor.shape.rename_dimension()

Progress was hard won, no thanks to our eternal greatest foe: The
kafkaesque nightmare that is TensorFlow documentation.

Artist rendition of the hole that is TensorFlow documentation.

Artist rendition of the hole that is TensorFlow documentation.

But our crack team of elite ML hackers was quickly making progress.

[70f1]
Sid2020-09-02
yes
[Screenshot]

And we were sure that we would be able to start training our first
models while only sacrificing a modicum of our mortal sanity.

[ea2d]
Connor2020-12-08
Broke: Achieving enlightenment to leave behind this frail mortal coil
Woke: Achieving enlightenment to do more tensorflow debugging at 2AM

And quickly, GPT-Neo took shape. A horrible, horrible shape, but
shape nonetheless! We were well on our way to doing real ML research!

[7c8f]
Jason Phang2021-03-24
[Screenshot]

The Pile#

What is training code without its data, though? Training large models
needs a large collection of data. A big heap if one will. A
significant mass. A sort of mound, even. And so was born...

[ea2d]
Connor2020-07-07
The Pile(tm)
Calling it anything else is a banable offense

Since OpenAI was being stingy with details on what data they had
trained on (and definitely weren't releasing a copy), we were, as
usual, forced to do it ourselves. After a cursory glance into the
abject horror that is average CommonCrawl data, we decided there had
to be a better way, and so set about collecting our own large
dataset, the Pile.

This went about as smoothly as you might imagine.

But, after months of hard work by many, many contributors at
EleutherAI, on New Year's Day 2021, the Pile preprint went live.

[89c7]
bmk2021-01-01
@everyone EleutherAI is proud to announce the release of the Pile, a
free and publicly available 800GB dataset of diverse English text for
language modeling! The creation of this dataset is the first step
towards our goal of replicating GPT-3.
Website: https://pile.eleuther.ai/ Paper: https://pile.eleuther.ai/
paper.pdf Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/nabla_theta/status/
1345130409579794432

First Results#

The exciting news was quickly followed up (the next day!) by the
announcement of our collaboration with CoreWeave, which pledged to
provide us with GPUs to make this crazy project a reality. Released
from the torment of having to work with TPUs without JAX (as JAX
wasn't yet in quite as usable a state as it is today), work on our
new codebase, GPT-NeoX began in earnest soon after.

[4ab2]
Stella Biderman2021-01-02
@everyone We've talked a couple times about how we have resources to
train a GPT-3, and figured we'd make an official announcement now
that we've gained so many new members. The organization that's behind
this is called CoreWeave. CoreWeave is a cloud service provider that
specializes in high performance ML. They're part of the NVIDIA
Preferred Cloud Services Provider network.
The basics of our deal is simple: they'll provide us the GPUs we need
to train a GPT-3-scale language model and in exchange we will 1) say
"thank you" to them very loudly 2) distill the model with the goal of
making it more feasible to deploy and 3) publish the weights for
anyone to use. No money is being exchanged in either direction.
2 and 3 were already things we had planned, and they are excited
about open source code and breaking Microsoft's monopoly. So it's a
very good fit for us.
The codebase is a work-in-progress as we figure out how to maximize
efficiency. To join the project check out #gpt-neo or follow the
GitHub repo: https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neox

While we didn't know it at the time, a second significant development
occurred that day: Phil Wang (@lucidrains) and Eric Alcaide (
@hypnopump) began collaborating on a replication of AlphaFold2.

A unicorn and and Ice Cream join forces.

With our first real results delivered, outside observers started to
take notice. The first mainstream article about EleutherAI was
published by VentureBeat around this time.

With the Pile wrapped up, and GPT-NeoX still a while away, we put our
TPUs to work on training our first large GPT-Neo models.

[89c7]
bmk2021-05-15
[unknown]
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
neo is segfaulting
[unknown]
internal scremaing
[unknown]
so
by moving the transformers import to the beginning, there's no
segfault
this only happens with this one pyenv, 3.8.10

Representative example of what training Neo was like.

And then we... promptly forgot about them.

We saw the 1.3B and 2.7B GPT-Neo models as our proofs of concept,
learning experiences on the road towards making models orders of
magnitude larger. There were so many problems with the codebase that
we were more focused on figuring out how to deal with those than
releasing our trained models. But after several months of sitting in
storage, we finally got around to releasing them on March 21st, 2021.

[70f1]
Sid2021-03-21
@everyone We've (finally) released the weights for the 1.3B and 2.7B
param models trained on The Pile that we've had sitting around on our
hard drives for ages over at https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neo/
Using the updated Colab notebook in the repo you should be able to
finetune the models on your own data as well as run inference. We'll
now be mostly archiving that repo in order to work on GPT-Neox (our
GPU model training repo). Feel free to ping me if you have any
problems getting the pretrained models / notebook running.
The Neo-x project is progressing well, the codebase is mostly stable
and we are now pretty much just waiting on the hardware to scale up.
We additionally have a Jax-based language modelling repository in the
works thanks to @Ben Wang and co, so keep your eyes peeled.

The Second Era of EleutherAI#

GPT-Neo and GPT-J#

This might seem quaint in retrospect, but we really didn't think
people would care that much about our "small models."

[4ab2]
Stella Biderman2021-03-23
Damn
[image0]
[d1ce]
cfoster02021-03-23
Whoa

Turns out, people did care.

This marked something of a new era of EleutherAI. We had already
gotten a good amount of attention for the Pile, but now we had proven
to the world we were the real deal. WIRED senior writer Will Knight
published This AI Can Generate Convincing Text--and Anyone Can Use It,
and other widely read articles follow. People were really excited to
use our models!

Over 100000 Downloads from Hugging Face Model hub.

In early April, we announced our exciting new GOOSE project.
Information about the GOOSE project can be found at https://
www.eleuther.ai/goose

[89c7]
bmk2021-04-01
We are proud to announce that EleutherAI is now rebranding as
GooseAI. Our new top priority is GOOSE (Goose-Oriented Object Search
Engine). GPT-neo (Goose Pretrained Transformer with new engine
option) is now deprecated.
For more information, please see our explanatory page: https://
eleuther.ai/goose.html
Honk!
EleutherAI Goose Logo

GPT-NeoX was going well, we finally had code that could scale all the
way to 175B, and beyond. We just needed the hardware to be ready.
Unfortunately, we timed things perfectly to line up with a global GPU
shortage which made things... challenging. We are continuing to work
with CoreWeave to source the computational resources we need.

While waiting for the code and resources for GPT-NeoX, we decided to
put the spare TPUs to use training a larger model. A new codebase,
Mesh Transformer JAX was written for simplicity and efficiency in
training medium sized models (<20B). After the customary TPU
wrangling (although much shorter this time due to JAX having far less
footguns than Mesh Tensorflow), a 6B parameter model was trained to
completion and released.

[d0c5]
Ben Wang2021-06-09
@everyone Today we are releasing the weights for GPT-J-6B, a 6
billion parameter model trained on the Pile, for use with a new
codebase, Mesh Transformer JAX. This model performs similarly in
downstream tasks to both GPT-3 6.7B and the Curie model accessible
via the OpenAI API.
Mesh Transformer JAX on GitHub: https://github.com/kingoflolz/
mesh-transformer-jax/ Colab Notebook for Inference: http://
colab.research.google.com/github/kingoflolz/mesh-transformer-jax/blob
/master/colab_demo.ipynb Web Demo (can take up to a minute to
generate, be patient): https://6b.eleuther.ai/ Blog post: https://
arankomatsuzaki.wordpress.com/2021/06/04/gpt-j/
We have created #gpt-j for questions and discussion about Mesh
Transformer JAX and GPT-J.

An Explosion of BioML Research#

The #alphafold channel grew quickly, attracting not only machine
learning people but also biology and chemistry people interested in
integrating new deep learning techniques into their work. By June,
the Bio ML group had grown enough that it made sense to spin it off
into its own server. While the main effort of replicating AlphaFold2
is still a work-in progress, several additional projects have
flourished:

  * Eric Alcide and Stella Biderman wrote a paper on faster
    algorithms for protein reconstruction, speeding up a mundane but
    important function by several orders of magnitude.
  * Michael Pieler (MicPie) has been building a CLIP-style model for
    amino acid sequences.
  * Stella Biderman is working with the authors of proteinBERT to
    scale their model and try out autoregressive modeling
    ("proteinGPT" perhaps).

At this point, it's most accurate to say that we have a biological ML
research group, headed up by Phil and Eric.

The Revival of #art#

Since the early days of Eleuther, there always had been the humble,
underutilized #art channel. While we had hoped it would be a place
for ML artists of various kinds to exchange and discuss their
creations, its initial purpose seemed mostly to be the dissemination
of obscure German memes.

Bruder muss loss

I assure you if you are a German ML researcher of a very specific age
this is the funniest shit you've ever seen.

But this would change after the release of CLIP, and the rapid
development of new techniques to generate astonishing ML art using
it. #art now serves as the promised hub for creating and exchanging
techniques, prompts, ideas and results, with the brilliant
engineer-artists hard at work developing cool new models and prompt
engineering techniques alike.

abandoned bitcoin mine as imagined by nmkd

abandoned bitcoin mine as imagined by nmkd

The Alchemist by Thomas Wijck as imagined by Janus

The Alchemist by Thomas Wijck as imagined by Janus

A Character Design of A Angel Warrior with it&rsquo;s Sword of
Divines , HDR , Rendered in Detailed Engine , Rendered in Super sharp
Engine , Details as imagined by Kianne

A Character Design of A Angel Warrior with it's Sword of Divines ,
HDR , Rendered in Detailed Engine , Rendered in Super sharp Engine ,
Details as imagined by Kianne

a beautiful epic wondrous fantasy painting of the ocean as imagined
by Katherine Crowson

a beautiful epic wondrous fantasy painting of the ocean as imagined
by Katherine Crowson

We recommend this wonderful post from Machine Learning at Berkeley
that gives an overview of a lot of the techniques, many pioneered by
the creative minds of folks in our very own #art channel.

Perhaps the most visually compelling development of #art is what
became known as the "unreal engine trick." CLIP was trained on the
internet, and the internet contains a lot of extremely high quality
images that have a caption mentioning the Unreal Engine. CLIP noticed
this, and we quickly realized that you could vastly improve the
generates images by simply mentioning the Unreal Engine:

[852f]
jbuster2021-04-26
if "3d render" work this well
"unreal engine" would probably look great
the angel of the sea. unreal engine as imagined by jbuster.This is
the first image generated with the unreal engine trick.

the angel of the sea. unreal engine as imagined by jbuster.
This is the first image generated with the `unreal engine trick'.

The Underground Studio, #the-faraday-cage#

#the-faraday-cage started as a channel to let anyone on our Discord
use our early Neo models, mostly to laugh at how terrible they were.
The channel has taken on (an insane) life of its own thanks to the
Discord bot @BATbot McHorse maintained by BoneAmputee, which lets
anyone on the server create art using CLIP. If #art is the display
gallery, #the-faraday-cage is the underground art studio.

The bot is hooked up to some of our unused GPUs and now handles a
staggering amount of requests, filling the Discord (and Twitter!)
with [DEL:spam:DEL] art and creativity. At last count, it has
produced over 35,000 images and survived two explosions in popularity
after high-profile HackerNews and Twitter posts.

[f7db]
BoneAmputee2021-07-06
.imagine I love when it rains. So cozy. -w 560 -h 416
[7dbe]
BATbot McHorse2021-07-06
I love when it rains. So cozy.
I love when it rains. So cozy. iteration 500/500 (100%) Elapsed:
8m36s

Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Future of EleutherAI#

[4aa7]
Zermelane2021-04-28
EleutherAI's Discord server is an unexpectedly terrifying place,
they're happily talking about practical AI stuff and things they are
working on, then maybe a good benchmark result comes out or something
and they'll banter just as happily about how the Earth is going to be
taken apart by AGI

And so, we come to the current day. One year of this crazy
cypherpunk-esque experiment, and with quite a lot to show for our
efforts.

People may know us as "those guys building an open source GPT-3", but
this was never our final ambition. Building large models is fun and
gratifying, but at heart, we are researchers, and this is just an
important first step to enable the kind of research we want to do.

EleutherAI has grown into a true collective. We host many different
kinds of research in different ML subfields. But ultimately, we also
believe in the power of AI, and the coming revolutions it will bring,
and its dangers.

[89c7]
bmk2021-03-19
"it's like the manhattan project, except the funding is 5 orders of
magnitude less, the people working on it are random nobodies from the
internet, atmospheric ignition is the default rather than the
unlikely outcome, and there are 5 soviet unions"

We believe that AI Alignment presents one of the, if not the most
important problems to be working on in our lifetime. And this is at
the core of what motivates us to be working on building and
understanding these large language models. The state of our
understanding of these powerful technologies is extremely primitive,
and this does not bode well for our future safety and flourishing.

[Dp3Y1d1X4AElzyq]

Safety research was always a primary motivation for our work at
EleutherAI, as we explained in our blogpost Why Release A Large
Language Model?. We think that access to large, pretrained models
will enable large swathes of research that would not have been
possible while such technologies are locked away behind corporate
walls. For-profit entities have explicit incentives to downplay risks
and discourage security probing. We want to help the wider safety and
security communities access and study these new technologies.

We ourselves are working on doing just this as well. We have produced
our first contribution to the wider alignment community in the form
of our Alignment Forum post Thoughts on the Alignment Implications of
Scaling, which summarizes many of the insights and ideas we have had
so far.

And this is just a start, multiple groups inside EleutherAI are
expanding their work in studying the safety and alignment of large,
self-supervised models to human values.

Reflections#

Do we even know what EleutherAI is after a year? EleutherAI has been
many things to many people.

    To my mind, EleutherAI is an AI hacking lab--and one unlike any
    other. In a year when many of us were suddenly cut off from
    in-person communication, our rag-tag assortment of researchers
    and hackers from around the globe somehow assembled on a Discord
    server and found ourselves trying to build the next big thing
    because wouldn't it be fun if we actually did it? There is a real
    excitement about advances in AI research, particularly with
    large-scale models, and a real drive to take ideas and put them
    to work quickly. The speed at which an idea can go from
    inspiration from the latest arXiv paper drop to full-scale
    experiment runs is astounding (there is literally a #speedrun
    channel). And while we do work on very important topics, a big
    part of EleutherAI is its more informal approach to research. For
    me, it's been a platform for more casual discussion, a
    replacement for the water cooler conversations where I can bounce
    off my silliest ideas and takes, poke fun at the field and
    ourselves, but very occasionally go "this, but unironically."

    Jason Phang (PhD Student, NYU)

    I first heard about EleutherAI in August, during a paper
    discussion in Yannic Kilcher's discord server. Someone mentioned
    a group of people trying to replicate GPT-3, and being one of the
    salty people who hadn't yet gotten the access to the OpenAI API,
    I was curious as to how it was even possible that a rag-tag
    discord server could even dare to have such an ambitious goal.
    Eventually I started observing from afar and began appreciating
    the knowledge base the entire server represented and thought
    'damn, this might actually be possible'. I also started focusing
    on AI safety for the first time in my life courtesy of our
    general focus on alignment, realizing the dangers a superhuman
    intelligence poses and how real it actually is as of today. It's
    been quite a ride for me: I found my first stable employment in
    no small part thanks to the friends I made at Eleuther, working
    on a project that will most certainly have a global impact and
    most importantly, vastly increasing my understanding of deep
    learning.

    Shivanshu Purohit (ML Engineer)

    I was bored and stumbled in here from a Reddit post, then
    proceeded to spend the next month doing data scraping and
    processing. It turns out there is a lot of grind behind those
    nice papers on arXiv! That and ML methods often don't generalize
    well to different datasets. Eleuther has been an amazing learning
    experience for me, and a great maintainer of sanity during the
    turbulent start of the 2020s.

    Laurence Golding (Web Developer / Programmer / ML Groupie)

    Even as a lurker in the early days, I immediately got the sense
    of Oh, this is gonna be big with Eleuther (then LibreAI). There's
    something about a collaboration between folks from across the
    world, most of whom have never met or who go by pseudonyms, doing
    AI research against all odds, that really stokes a feeling of
    frenetic excitement. Also, EleutherAI happens to host some of the
    smartest and strangest characters I know, who I have the pleasure
    of hanging out with in the #research channel and working on
    projects with. They say iron sharpens iron, and I think that
    applies: there's a virtuous cycle here that somehow leads to
    high-caliber research and high-caliber memes alike. I'm truly
    excited to see where the next year takes all of us.

    Charles Foster (R&D Scientist)

    If nothing else, EleutherAI demonstrates how far initiative and
    drive can take you in today's world. EleutherAI is full of people
    who don't have traditional credentials, but that hasn't stopped
    us from doing awesome things. Many people, both established
    researchers and undergrads, come in and offer to help, but the
    people who stick around have nothing in common but an interest in
    pushing AI research forward. And that's pretty awesome.

    Horace He (AI Researcher / AI Framework developer)

    I like to feel that my involvement was an accident--a lurker who
    got involved because they were the right man in the wrong place.
    What started slightly over five months ago as "it cannot hurt to
    stick around" snowballed into assisting the early development of
    GPT-NeoX, writing papers and maintaining a website. It has been
    among the most valuable experiences I have ever had, and I have
    had a tremendous amount of fun along the way.

    In hindsight, EleutherAI filled a section of my life that I had
    been looking to fill for some time: a place where I could
    motivate myself to get work done that would truly make a
    difference in the world. I was loyal to the cause, and in return,
    it brought me experiences that I would have never imagined six
    months ago. We all may be a little crazy, but that is what is
    needed to tread new ground in a cutting-edge field. I cannot
    imagine what that new ground has in store, and I cannot wait to
    find out.

    Eric Hallahan (Undergraduate Student, PSU)

    Like many history nerds, I have often wondered how cool it would
    have been if I could live in the time and place where the major
    intellectual ideas that would shape our world were formed.
    Imagine hanging out in the coffee houses of Europe with
    Enlightenment thinkers in the 1700s, or visiting XEROX PARC in
    the 1970s, or partying with the Paypal mafia in the 2000s... But
    what are the odds, right?

    Then one day during the pandemic summer of 2020 AD, I found
    myself in this strange dream-like place, a community of
    international Machine Learning flaneurs who somehow became
    convinced that they could actually make history. At first, I
    thought it would just be a fun place to discuss new AI
    developments. But I soon discovered that yeah, these people are
    serious about their ambitions, and more thrillingly they actually
    would like to have me on board! As it turns out, the fact that
    Machine Learning engineers despise JavaScript (while still
    needing it) become my entry ticket to some of the coolest
    projects I ever worked on.

    So, it has been a fun, surreal year--and yet something tells me we
    are just getting started.

    Janko Prester (Front End Engineer / UI Designer)

    I am a hacker in the original sense of the word: one who enjoys
    the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming limitations
    of software systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes. When a
    friend introduced me to EleutherAI last summer, I was in a
    depressive funk. My friend hoped that the people and ideas of EAI
    would strike my interest and whimsy, and he couldn't have been
    more correct.

    EleutherAI is a special place. The passion, ambition, and
    bemusing arrogance of its members roused me back to life. It is a
    place where people don't pause to ask "who am I to try to do
    this." It is a place that follows the true spirit of the old
    French boast: `Mme, si c'est possible, c'est fait; si c'est
    impossible, cela se fera.' `If it's possible, madam, it's done;
    if it's impossible, it shall be done!'

    Stella Biderman (Mathematician and AI Researcher)

    I often like to joke about how Eleuther is an outlier in that it
    has the most publications of any discord server--we're "just" a
    bunch of volunteers working on stuff for fun, and yet we've
    gotten such a huge amount of stuff done in the past year.
    Eleuther is about more than just research, though. It's also one
    of the most vibrant online communities that I've ever had the
    pleasure of being a part of, with constant lively discussions
    about scaling, alignment, and other ML topics (and memes, of
    course) with the most interesting cast of interlocutors. I can't
    overstate how proud I am of what we've created so far ex nihilo.
    Our first year has been an incredible journey, but we're only
    just getting started--here's to many more.

    Leo Gao (EleutherAI Cofounder)

Maybe it is the realization that Schmidhuber has been right all
along.

[40f1]
FractalCycle2020-10-10
i
wait is Schmidhuber real? i thought that was fake
i literally cannot tell rn
[40f1]
FractalCycle2020-10-10
i thought he was a fake 1800s german philosopher like hegel that we
just made up

Or maybe it is the most advanced producer of alignment memes. (I
promise these are hilarious if you are one of the three people that
know what FDT is)

[stopdoingfdt] [E0Rj6wZVUAA3N_Y] [EzWfgekVcAoqD1s]
[gradienthackingtime]

We're not sure we know even today what EleutherAI really is, maybe
we'll figure it out this year.

[unknown]


    What makes EleutherAI special? It's hard to say, even for me.
    It's lightning in a bottle. Right place, right time, right
    people. Nothing like this could have been planned. Living inside
    of something special feels remarkably not-special. I don't know
    what the legacy of what we have accomplished here will ultimately
    be. But if EleutherAI has been one thing to me personally, it's
    hope. A crack in the pervasive narrative of disempowerment. If a
    small group of smart, ambitious friends can make this much
    happen, what else is possible? History has a feeling of
    inevitability when viewed with the benefit of hindsight, but
    ultimately history is written by people. I think we've earned
    ourselves at least a curious footnote in history, but the story
    is far from over. To me, EleutherAI has been purpose,
    companionship and hope. Hope that the future isn't yet carved in
    stone. Let us carve something beautiful.

    Connor Leahy (EleutherAI Cofounder)

It's been a weird year.

But for our little science project, it has also been an amazing year.
All we can say is: Thank you, to everyone that made it possible.

On to an even better second year!

(c) 2021 EleutherAI