A research lab is a container
School is a building which has four walls with tomorrow inside. - Lon Watters
Welcome to the Office of Language Interfaces (OLI). I'm starting this project as a way to document and expand on ideas that have been swirling in my mind for the last year and a half.
Ever since starting at Anthropic, writing software has become fun again. It reminds me of the earliest years of my career where every week there was a new JavaScript library. The energy in the ecosystem was infectious as people were collaborating and building on top of one another’s ideas out in the open.
This energy seems to have returned as software built with/built for AI is spreading. This research lab is an attempt to contribute to that energy. It is open-source because the fate of this technology and all technology shouldn’t belong to a few thousand people in a city in California. Open-source with the hopes of creating open knowledge and branching pathways of different outcomes this technology can take. Alternatives in a world of inevitability.
In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin writes that the first human tools weren't weapons but containers—bags, nets, vessels to carry gathered seeds and roots. "A book holds words. Words hold things," she observes, proposing that stories themselves are carrier bags, medicine bundles that hold ideas in powerful relation to each other. This research lab is a container. In today's moment research labs are the organizing body for AI projects. This project borrows from that form—not as a weapon aimed at disrupting or conquering, but as a vessel for gathering, carrying, and sharing the small but essential seeds of ideas about how software might better respond to human language. A place to collect what we discover, carry it forward, and offer it to others who might plant these ideas in their own work. I’m excited for wherever this journey takes us.