A new old kind of R&D lab
Answer.AI launched in December 2023, founded by fast.ai and Kaggle co-founder Jeremy Howard with Lean Startup creator Eric Ries, backed by $10M from Decibel VC. Modeled on historic industrial labs like Bell Labs, it deliberately avoids the AGI race — instead focusing on making existing models dramatically more useful through foundational research that ships as practical, mostly open-source products.
Notable output
The fully remote team has produced an outsized stream of influential work: ModernBERT, a state-of-the-art family of encoder models developed with LightOn and Hugging Face; FastHTML, a Python framework for modern web apps; the FSDP+QLoRA technique that enabled fine-tuning 70B models on consumer gaming GPUs; the rerankers library and ColBERT retrieval tools; and Solveit, an educational platform teaching AI-assisted problem solving.
Philosophy
Answer.AI operates as a compact team of 'deep-tech generalists' publishing research, code and long-form writing on AI policy and practice. For developers, it is one of the highest signal-to-noise sources of applied AI engineering in the ecosystem.