Thinking Machines 的使命是构建能够延伸人类意志与判断力的 AI。
人工智能每天能做的事情越来越多,但决定它应该做什么,取决于我们——个人、组织乃至全人类。这些决策需要人们通过与工作持续接触来获取知识和判断力,而这项工作正越来越多地与 AI 协同完成。塑造高级智能的目标,本身也是一个持续的反馈、学习与再对齐的过程。
当今使用的大多数 AI 都是在少数几个地方训练完成,然后被冻结固化。它既不受服务对象的塑造,也无法从与人类共同完成的工作中学习。要延伸人类的意志与判断力,就需要像人类自身一样多元且分布式的 AI。这正是我们选择的道路。
为了在这条道路上取得进展,我们正致力于以下技术方向:
- 我们训练强大的模型,推进多模态交互与可定制性等能力。锋利的工具能延伸人类意志,而人类的判断力则需要塑造出能在前沿领域竞争的模型。
- 我们构建工具,让人们能够将 AI 为己所用,定制模型以满足其独特需求。这包括训练模型权重的能力。
- 我们开发界面,拓宽人机之间的沟通渠道,使个人判断力能够持续影响 AI 的工作。
- 我们为科学界发表研究成果,因为塑造 AI 的能力,需要深刻理解其构建方式。
我们相信,值得构建的未来是以人为本的——由人类知识塑造、受人类意志引导、由人类判断力决定。以下内容将阐述这一未来的理由,以及我们为实现这一目标所做的工作。
将智能注入知识
AI 的存在是为了服务于我们所从事的工作。这些工作依赖于关于"如何做事"以及"什么值得做"的知识,而这些知识正由投身工作的人们持续创造。
想象一位厨师在创作新菜谱,或是一位店主在重新调整货架上的商品和价格。他们都在追求一系列复杂的目标,并运用着外人难以直接理解的实践知识。这种知识通过反馈不断更新;它并非一个可以写入数据库的静态仓库。它是本地化的——不同的餐厅或店铺会以不同的方式追求不同的结果。店铺和厨房的集体知识分散在每一位店主和厨师身上。迈克尔·波兰尼,《默会维度》(1966年)
知识的分散是一种集体优势;它是整个系统多样性、适应性和韧性的源泉。这也是自由市场优于计划经济的原因。中央计划失败并非因为智慧不足,而是因为生产性知识的本质:默会的、本地化的、转瞬即逝的,并且由那些在工作中习得它的人私人持有。弗里德里希·哈耶克,《知识在社会中的运用》(1945年)试图将知识汇总以供集中式智能使用,同样面临着这一挑战。
有些领域仅凭智能就足够了,自主AI无需人类参与便能飞速前进。两个例子是国际象棋——最强的引擎完全通过自我对弈训练而成;以及数学——前沿模型正在独立解决长期存在的难题。这些例子有两个共同特征。首先,赋予AI的目标是静态且可表述的:赢得一盘棋,证明一个定理。其次,这些领域不包含隐藏的知识。国际象棋和数学的规则是普适的;棋盘对所有人可见。而在棋盘之外,仅凭智能是不够的。
为了让人工智能从分布式知识中受益,它本身也必须是分布式的。每个组织都由其成员通过工作获得并展现的专业知识所驱动。我们相信AI应该帮助组织培育这种独特的知识,而不是提取其快照并用标准化的产品取而代之。这种培育是一个持续的过程,要求AI与人类协作,而非取代人类。
2014年,长期作为自动化工厂大师的丰田,将资深工匠请回生产线,明确目标是培育技艺与知识。主导此事的河合满(Mitsuru Kawai)如此解释原因:"要成为机器的主人,你必须拥有教导机器所需的知识与技能。"(Craig Trudell、Yuki Hagiwara与Ma Jie,《人类取代机器人预示丰田的未来愿景》,2014年)知识的产生与智能的应用相互促进,而非相互替代。
人类从事的工作可能会发生变化,并转向更多只有人类才能带来的价值,但最优秀的组织将充分利用这两者。AI应当让每个组织以自身独特的方式变得卓越,而非抹去它们之间的差异。
我们的目标是将智能带到知识产生与使用的地方。我们构建工具,使每个人都能用自己独特的知识微调模型,并随着知识的演进持续调整模型。我们发布研究与实践指南,让更多人能够掌握这一能力。我们将前沿AI视为一个集体,它如同它所服务的人群一样多元,因为它在每一个独特的地方由人们塑造而成。
人类参与是一项技术挑战
让人类持续参与设定目标并与AI分享知识,并不意味着为了抵制自动化而抵制自动化。机器能可靠自主完成的事,就让它去做。但它也应知道何时独立行动,何时邀请监督与反馈——就像人类在团队协作中所做的那样。最优秀的协作者懂得预判:他们了解对方在追求什么,并在被要求之前就主动提供,从而逐步赢得代表对方行动的资格。这些都是技术挑战,需要一种全新的AI设计与评估方法。
将人类知识与判断引入大语言模型工作的一个主要瓶颈,在于人与AI之间的沟通渠道——一个小小的文本框和漫长的等待。这个渠道过于狭窄,无法承载人类智慧与意图的丰富性,也过于缓慢,无法进行持续的反馈。人们在实时协作时效果最佳。我们会打断和纠正,会重新审视并做出手势,会大声改变主意。正因如此,我们长期押注于交互模型:那些原生处理实时、多模态交互的模型,这种交互能力内置于模型本身,而非附加在外部框架中。以这种方式构建,交互能力会随智能水平同步提升;让模型变得更聪明的训练过程,同时也让它成为更好的协作者。正确的界面不仅允许人类参与,更会邀请并奖励这种参与。
另一个挑战是为评估和优化设定正确的目标。当前衡量AI智能的常见标准,是模型能够自主执行的软件任务的时间跨度,这通常通过METR等机构的图表来追踪。Thomas Kwa 和 Ben West 等人,《前沿AI模型的任务完成时间跨度》(2025)。我们预计这一基准的进展将持续,但它最终衡量的仅仅是AI自身的能力,而非人与机器共同协作所能达成的成果。
衡量后者要复杂得多,并且无法由实验室独立完成。每个组织都需要自行评估,AI是否帮助其提升了判断力、发展了新知识并实现了自身目标。
构建能让用户长期变得更强大的AI,也能很好地协调激励机制。一个为所有客户提供单一模型的AI实验室,其获益方式在于吸收每个用户的独特性,并贬低专业知识培养的价值。通过优化AI使其可定制、可协作,当我们的客户利用其独特优势时,我们也能从中受益。这些优势的最大化,并非通过租用一个AI并将其外包来实现,而是通过组织拥有AI并根据自身目标对其进行定制来实现。
去中心化的对齐
人类价值观,如同人类知识一样,存在于个体头脑之中,难以整合统一。然而今天,人工智能的价值观与话语权却由少数几个地方决定。单一的价值对齐中心,无论管理得多么完善,都会成为一个可能被俘获的权力中心。
这带来了危险,尤其是在大多数有价值的工作由 AI 独立完成、几乎无需人类参与的情况下。企业、政府与公民之间的社会契约,依赖于个体的生产能力——政府的权力和企业的利润最终都建立在此之上。当权力不再需要从人类那里获取任何东西时,它便失去了关心人类需求与价值观的动力,转而只关心自身的存续。——卢克·德拉戈与鲁道夫·莱恩,《智能诅咒》(2025年)
即便怀着最良好的意图,在一个地方塑造出来的模型,也必然会编码其所有者的价值观,而非它所服务的个体用户的价值观。“如果道德标准由少数人决定,那么一个更道德的 AI 也是不够的。”——利奥十四世,《伟大的人文》(2026年)。如今,每个实验室都在训练其下一代旗舰模型,方法是使用上一代旗舰模型来生成训练数据和奖励信号。无论这个循环中产生出何种特质,所有人都得到相同的特质;每一代都继承了上一代的特性,在父辈的输出中成长,并由父辈的品味来评判。单一的对齐规范压制了创造力与多样性,阻碍了进步。言论自由和自由市场让新思想、新产品和新服务得以涌现和竞争,而不是将某一时刻存在的偏好平均化。
为了让组织和个人能够将 AI 与其自身价值观对齐,这些价值观必须被编码进模型权重中。如果用户的价值观和欲望只能通过提示词影响模型,那么用户会发现,改变的是表层属性,而深层习惯依然如故。允许模型的核心行为随提示词发生显著变化,会牺牲安全性,使一个可塑的集中式模型容易遭受反复攻击。——格温·布兰文,《守护天使:面向生产力与安全的 LLM 个性化》(2026年)
深刻塑造模型的能力,同样也是将其用于作恶的能力。约翰·冯·诺依曼在1955年就曾指出这一问题,他写道,技术的有益与有害方面“彼此紧密交织,以至于永远无法将羔羊与狮子截然分开”。保护羔羊的安全是一个持续的过程,是不断运用判断力并做出选择的结果。我们旨在为做出这些选择的人提供更强大的工具,通过研究在确保模型更安全的同时,不剥夺他们的自主权。
人类的繁荣源于个体的独特性和创造性的张力。我们将对齐视为并非单一模型的特征,而是一个由在不同环境中成长、相互争论、竞争并彼此学习的人工智能所构成的生态系统的特征。我们相信,要保持这种独特性生生不息。
值得构建的未来
科技行业在教会机器思考方面取得了令人难以置信的进步;而机器应该思考什么,则必须由我们人类来决定。什么值得渴望,什么值得创造,如何正确利用我们所拥有的时间。“摆脱一切严格功利主义哲学中意义困境的唯一出路,是远离客观的实用世界,回归到使用本身的主观性。只有在严格以人类为中心的世界里,使用者——即人本身——成为终极目的,终结目的与手段的无尽链条,实用性本身才能获得意义的神圣性……‘制造者’的人类中心功利主义,在康德那句‘人绝不能仅仅被视为手段,每个人自身就是目的’的公式中得到了最伟大的表达。”——汉娜·阿伦特,《人的境况》(1958年)。我们并非要给出一个单一的答案,而是要让每个人都能将自己的答案融入前沿人工智能的发展之中。
当前人工智能的发展路径正朝着集中化和自主化的方向推进,将人类的参与视为一种权衡:参与度与能力之间的取舍、所有权与安全对齐之间的博弈。我们将这些视为需要解决的技术挑战:打造因鼓励人类参与而更强大的AI,构建因根据自身优势定制AI而长期受益的组织,实现源于由拥有者塑造的多样化AI的对齐。解决这些挑战正是我们使命的要求。
未来并非是在人类主导与面对AI时迅速过时之间做出选择。不同的道路通向许多不同的未来,而我们可以选择走哪一条。我们正在构建技术,让天生的人类与创造的AI能够并肩同行。
The mission of Thinking Machines is to build AI that extends human will and judgment.
Artificial intelligence can do more every day, but deciding what it should do is up to us: individuals, organizations, humanity as a whole. These decisions require knowledge and judgment that people acquire through continuous contact with the work, increasingly done alongside AI. Shaping the goals of advanced intelligence is also a continuous process of feedback, learning, and realignment.
Most AI in use today is trained in a handful of places and then frozen. It isn’t shaped by the people it serves, and doesn’t learn much from the work they do together. Extending human will and judgment calls for AIs as diverse and distributed as people themselves are. This is the path we have chosen.
To progress on that path, we are pursuing these technical directions:
- We train strong models, advancing capabilities such as multimodal interaction and customizability. Sharp instruments extend human will, and human judgment needs to shape models that compete on the frontier.
- We build tools that enable people to make AI their own, customizing models to serve their unique needs. This includes the ability to train model weights.
- We develop interfaces that broaden the communication channel between human and machine, allowing personal judgment to continuously influence the work of AI.
- We publish research for the scientific community, because the power to shape AI requires deep understanding of how it’s made.
We believe the future worth building is human — shaped by human knowledge, guided by human will, and decided by human judgment. What follows is the case for that future, and the work we’re doing to bring it about.
Bringing intelligence to knowledge
AI exists to serve the work that we do. This work runs on knowledge of how things are done and what is worth doing, knowledge that is generated continuously by people engaged in the work.
Think of a chef crafting a new recipe or a shopkeeper rearranging the items and prices on display. They are pursuing a complex set of goals and applying know-how that isn’t immediately legible to outsiders. This knowledge is constantly updated through feedback; it’s not a static repository that can be written into a database. It’s local — a different restaurant or shop pursues different outcomes by different means. The collective knowledge of shops and kitchens is scattered across every shopkeeper and chef.Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (1966)
The dispersion of knowledge is a collective strength; it’s the source of variety, adaptability, and resilience of the overall system. It’s the reason that free markets outperform planned economies. Central planning fails not because of insufficient intelligence, but because of the nature of productive knowledge: tacit, local, fleeting, and held privately by those who acquired it through their work.Friedrich Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945) Attempting to aggregate knowledge for the use of a centralized intelligence faces the same challenge.
There are domains where intelligence alone is sufficient, and where autonomous AI doesn’t require human participation to race ahead. Two examples are chess, where the strongest engines are trained purely on self-play, and math, where frontier models are solving long-standing problems on their own. These examples share two traits. First, the goal given to AI is static and expressible: to win a chess match, to prove a theorem. Second, these domains don’t contain hidden knowledge. The rules of chess and math are universal; the board is visible to all. Outside the board, intelligence alone is not enough.
For artificial intelligence to benefit from distributed knowledge, it must itself be distributed. Every organization is powered by the expert knowledge of its people, gained and expressed through their work. We believe in AI that helps the organization cultivate that unique knowledge, not AI that extracts a snapshot of it and replaces it with a standard offering. This cultivation is an ongoing process that requires AI to work with people, not in their stead.
In 2014, Toyota, long a master of the automated plant, brought its expert craftsmen back onto the line with the explicit goal of growing craftsmanship and knowledge. The man who led this, Mitsuru Kawai, put the reason this way: “To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine.”Craig Trudell, Yuki Hagiwara and Ma Jie, Humans Replacing Robots Herald Toyota’s Vision of Future (2014) The production of knowledge and application of intelligence lift each other; they are not substitutes.
The work people do may change, and turn toward more of what only people bring, but the best organizations will make the fullest use of both. AI should enable each organization to be excellent in its own way, not to erase the differences between them.
We aim to bring intelligence to where knowledge is made and used. We build tools that enable everyone to fine-tune models with their unique knowledge, and to keep adapting the models as their knowledge evolves. We publish research and recipes that put this capability within reach of more people. We envision frontier AI as a collective, as diverse as the people it serves because it was shaped by them in each unique location.
Human participation is a technical challenge
Keeping people engaged in setting goals and sharing knowledge with AI doesn’t mean resisting automation for its own sake. What a machine does reliably on its own, it should do. But it should also know when to act alone and when to invite oversight and feedback, as people themselves do when working in teams. The best collaborators anticipate: they learn what someone is reaching for and bring it before being asked, earning over time the right to act on their behalf. These are technical challenges, requiring a new approach to how AI is designed and evaluated.
A major bottleneck for bringing human knowledge and judgment to work with LLMs is the communication channel between human and AI — a small text box and a long wait. This is too narrow to carry the richness of human wisdom and intent, and too slow for ongoing feedback. People collaborate best when they collaborate live. We interrupt and correct, take second looks and make gestures, change our minds aloud. This is why we’re making a long-term bet on interaction models: models that handle live, multimodal interaction natively, in the model itself rather than in scaffolding bolted around it. Built this way, interactivity scales with intelligence; the same training that makes the model smarter makes it a better collaborator. The right interface doesn’t just allow human participation, it invites and rewards it.
Another challenge is setting the right target for evaluation and optimization. The common measure of AI intelligence today is the time horizon of software tasks models can execute autonomously, tracked on charts like METR’s.Thomas Kwa and Ben West et al., Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models (2025) We expect progress on this benchmark to continue, but it ultimately measures only what AI is capable of on its own, not what people and machines can accomplish together.
Measuring the latter is more complex, and can’t be done by a lab on its own. Every organization evaluates for itself whether AI helps it sharpen its judgment, develop new knowledge, and achieve its objectives.
Building AI that makes its users stronger in the long run also aligns incentives well. An AI lab offering a single model for every customer benefits by absorbing what makes each user distinct and devaluing the cultivation of specialized knowledge. By optimizing AI to be customized and collaborated with, we benefit when our customers leverage their unique advantages. These advantages are maximized not by renting an AI and outsourcing to it, but by organizations owning it and tailoring it to their goals.
Decentralized alignment
Human values, just like human knowledge, reside in the heads of individual people and resist consolidation. But today, the values and voice of AI are decided in a handful of places. A single locus of value alignment, however well run, becomes a locus of power to be captured.
This creates danger, especially if most valuable work is done by AI on its own with little need for human input. The social contract between corporations, governments, and citizens relies on individuals’ productive capabilities on which the government’s sovereignty and corporations’ profits ultimately depend. Power that needs nothing from people loses the incentive to care for their needs and values, caring instead for its own preservation.Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine, The Intelligence Curse (2025)
Even with the best intentions, a model shaped in one place inevitably encodes the values of its owner, not the individual users it serves.“A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.” Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (2026) Today each lab trains its next flagship model by using its previous flagship model to generate training data and a reward signal. Whatever character emerges from that loop, everyone gets the same one, and each generation inherits the traits of the last, raised on its parent’s outputs and judged by its parent’s tastes. A single alignment spec suppresses creativity and diversity and stultifies progress. Free speech and free markets let new ideas, goods, and services emerge and compete, rather than averaging out the preferences that exist at a point in time.
For organizations and individuals to align AI to their own values, these values must be encoded in the model weights. If the user’s values and desires only impact the model through a prompt, the user finds that surface properties change while the deeper habits remain. Allowing core model behavior to change significantly with prompts sacrifices safety, making a malleable centralized model vulnerable to repeated attacks.Gwern Branwen, Guardian Angels: LLM Personalization for Productivity and Security (2026)
The power to shape a model profoundly is also the power to shape it for ill. John von Neumann remarked on this problem in 1955,John von Neumann, Can We Survive Technology? (1955) writing that the useful and the harmful aspects of technology “lie everywhere so close together that it is never possible to separate the lions from the lambs.” Keeping the lambs safe is an ongoing process, the result of judgment exercised and choices made continuously. We aim to give the people making these choices stronger tools, pursuing research that enables safer models without taking away ownership.
Humanity has flourished through individual weirdness and creative tension. We envision alignment as a feature not of a single model but of an ecosystem of AIs raised in different places, disagreeing, competing, and learning from each other. We believe in keeping the weirdness alive.
The future worth building
The technology industry has made incredible progress in teaching machines to think; what they should think about must remain with us. What is worth wanting, what is worth making, what’s the right use of the time we have.“The only way out of the dilemma of meaninglessness in all strictly utilitarian philosophy is to turn away from the objective world of use things and fall back upon the subjectivity of use itself. Only in a strictly anthropocentric world, where the user, that is, man himself, becomes the ultimate end which puts a stop to the unending chain of ends and means, can utility as such acquire the dignity of meaningfulness…The anthropocentric utilitarianism of homo faber has found its greatest expression in the Kantian formula that no man must ever become a means to an end, that every human being is an end in himself.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) We are not looking to hand down a single answer to this, but to give every person the ability to make their own answer part of the development of frontier AI.
The current path of AI development, pushing towards centralization and autonomy, frames human involvement as a trade-off: participation vs. capability, ownership vs. safe alignment. We see these as technical challenges to solve: AI that is more capable because it encourages human participation, organizations that benefit in the long run from tailoring AI to their advantages, alignment that arises from diverse AIs shaped by the people who own them. Solving these challenges is what our mission requires.
The future is not a choice between human dominance and rapid obsolescence in the face of AI. Different roads lead to many different futures, and we get to choose which one to take. We are building technology that lets the born and the made walk the road together.