Invited Talk Sat, Apr 25, 2026 • 1:45 PM – 2:45 PM PDT Amphitheater

Marin: Open Development of Frontier AI

Percy Liang

Abstract

Overflow Room: 201 A/B - As AI capabilities skyrocket, openness plummets: the scientific community and broader public knows little of how frontier models (including open-weight models) are trained. I will describe Marin, a radically new way of doing model development, inspired by true open-source software. Every experiment is done in the open, and anyone can suggest ideas, review, and even run experiments through GitHub, providing a better way of doing science that improves on preregistration, reproducibility, and peer review. I will discuss a selection of scientific results that have emerged from Marin, including new optimizers and scaling laws. We hope that Marin will be a platform for the community to participate in the development of frontier AI.

Speaker

Percy Liang

Percy Liang is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, co-founder of Together AI and Simile AI, and the creator of Marin, a platform for developing foundation models fully in the open. He has made a number of contributions in AI, including the SQuAD question answering dataset, the HELM benchmarking framework, generative agents, prefix tuning, and coining the term "foundation models". His awards include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2019), IJCAI Computers and Thought Award (2016), an NSF CAREER Award (2016), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2015), a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2014), and paper awards at ACL, EMNLP, ICML, COLT, ISMIR, CHI, UIST, and RSS.