AI you can feel good using.

The problem with AI today

Generative AI is extractive. It is trained on work taken without consent, it wastes enormous amounts of energy to produce and utilize, the internals are largely inexplicable and opaque, and it is owned by a handful of companies who sell it largely without a conscience.

We believe you should have a better option, one that considers the harms wrought by the industry at large, and does the best possible job to mitigate them.

We care about people.

Consent comes first. We will find a solution to pay creatives fairly for their inputs. We aim to construct clean datasets with safe content, with consent, preventing liability for the industry at large. We think it should be the norm that provenance is tracked. The people whose work makes our models possible should receive the benefits of the added value.

We care about the environment.

Do you think that the world's biggest tech companies lack the resources to solve the environmental problems they create? We don't. It's a choice. We build efficient AI. Our vision is to create models that can run on commodity hardware, powerfully, and cleanly, without need for large use data centers or specialty hardware. We envision products that use classical ML wherever possible, to use the right tools for the job.

We also point our models at problems worth solving: improving climate change research, and helping science stay public, funded, and free to do good work. All of our models utilize the Hippocratic license for a reason. We will never release a model to "replace" a human or to generate creative work.

We will not repeat the same tired patterns

We cannot get to a better outcome by copying the playbook that created the problem. At Lowdown, we are fully and radically transparent, equal, and democratic. DEI is the core of how the organization is built, not an afterthought.

We will soon be structured as a democratic public benefit corporation so the incentives stay aligned with doing good, rather than with extraction. We will always put our money where our heart is.

Fair trade for AI

Think of us as fair trade for AI. Maybe we cannot clean the world, but we promise to do our best to be excellent, to shine a light on the darkness, and never back down from the truth. Better is possible. This is the way.