Vision

Four years into Zen’s development, it’s worth stepping back to assess where we are and where we’re going. Open AI development has made remarkable progress. It also faces significant challenges. Here’s my honest assessment. What We’ve Achieved Competitive Models Open models now match or exceed proprietary alternatives in many domains: Coding: Open models lead on HumanEval and MBPP Reasoning: Competitive on GSM8K and MATH General knowledge: Within 5% on MMLU Multilingual: Often superior for non-English languages The capability gap that seemed insurmountable in 2021 has largely closed for models under 100B parameters....

Science has a problem. The incentive structures that govern research are misaligned with the pursuit of knowledge. Publication pressure rewards novel positive results over replication. Funding flows to established labs with predictable outputs. Access to research remains gated behind paywalls. Decentralized Science (DeSci) offers a path forward. What’s Broken The Publication System Academic publishing extracts value at every step. Researchers give away their work. Peer reviewers donate their time. Universities pay subscription fees to access the results....

Science is Broken The modern scientific enterprise suffers from systemic dysfunction: Publication cartels charge researchers to publish and readers to access Reproducibility crisis undermines trust in published findings Funding concentration directs resources toward safe, incremental work Credential gatekeeping excludes capable researchers without institutional affiliation These are not bugs. They are features of a system optimized for the interests of incumbents, not the advancement of knowledge. A Decentralized Alternative Decentralized Science (DeSci) applies blockchain and cryptographic primitives to scientific infrastructure:...

Today we’re announcing Zen, an open AI research initiative from Zoo Labs Foundation. Why Zen? The current trajectory of AI development concentrates power in a handful of organizations. Models are trained on humanity’s collective knowledge, yet the resulting systems remain proprietary. We believe there’s a better path. Zen represents our commitment to building AI that is: Open: All research, weights, and training methodologies published freely Decentralized: No single point of control or failure Aligned: Built with explicit mechanisms for community governance Efficient: Optimized for accessibility, not just raw capability The Technical Foundation We’re starting with a focus on three areas:...