Make the latent visible.
L8NTLABS is a small AI research lab run by Tom Duffy, Head of AI Strategy at Noble Studios. I help people understand the complexities of AI without drowning them in jargon.
A research lab with the doors open.
Small Model Research
An ongoing program asking how far small, cheap models can be pushed under one fixed testing protocol. Findings will be published here as they land.
View project →OpenArms
An open source library and SDK that gives AI models access to the physical world through microcontrollers and sensors.
View project →Orin
An agentic harness built specifically for smaller local models, able to write code and run scheduled tasks. In development, not yet public.
View project →Mate1
A chess engine written from scratch in Rust, playing live on Lichess at around a 2076 Blitz rating and under active development.
View project →Existential Fret, Effective Altruism, and the Open-Weight Threat
Frontier lab CEOs suddenly agree that AI is too dangerous to race ahead. Follow the funding, the marriages, and the balance sheets, and the panic starts looking like a regulatory cartel move against open-weight models.
Read →What Intelligence Should Cost
Most people buy intelligence the same way they buy a car. Bigger, and hope the next one is cheaper. We run a small lab that asks what intelligence actually costs, and whether you can buy the same capability for less.
Read →Switching From Ollama to llama.cpp For Local Inference
Local agentic coding is finally good enough to start taking architecture and performance more seriously. By switching from Ollama to llama.cpp, everything has improved for me. Speed, tool-calling, reliability...everything.
Read →The "unlimited" AI plan was always going to end
The big AI companies are shifting from flat "unlimited" subscriptions toward paying for every token you use. Here is why that was inevitable, and why running your own models and tools is the best protection against being priced out.
Read →Questions, pushback, ideas.
The lab is small and the inbox is read personally. Research collaborations, corrections to anything published here, or a good argument about where AI is heading ... all welcome.
Write to the lab →