Writing
Notes from an open lab.
Model releases, evaluation, infrastructure, Gaeilge AI and the case for building language technology in public.
Latest / Gaeilge
12 Jul 2026 / 9 min
The future of the Irish language in the AI era
Irish needs more than a chatbot demo. It needs licensed data, fluent-speaker evaluation, open models, durable institutions, and tools people choose to use.
Read article02
Open source
12 Jul 2026 / 8 min
Open source is language infrastructure
For a lower-resource language, inspectable weights, documented datasets, open evaluations, and community governance are practical safeguards against digital dependence.
03
Launch
17 May 2026 / 14 min
Born-9B Preview is finally here
The launch note for Born-9B Preview: Repath at the controls, GPT-5.5 Codex managing the run, the datasets, failures, benchmarks, and the public adapter.
04
Launch
17 May 2026 / 7 min
Born Chat is open: PromptKit UI, live model lanes, and the public training loop
What shipped in Born Chat, how the Born and comparison lanes are organized, why the training notice is explicit, and what Born Chat Pro is meant to become.
05
Systems
15 May 2026 / 11 min
Why Codex GPT-5.5 Operated Born-9B
The operating model behind the run: Codex GPT-5.5 High, Repath Ray Khan at the controls, and a model release managed through evidence, caveats, and repository state.
06
Essay
14 May 2026 / 6 min
How Born-9B Learned to Breathe
The origin story of Born-9B told from the real notes: the cheap first run, the honest tie, the many teachers, and the million-token second inhale.
07
Research
14 May 2026 / 8 min
Born-9B v1: Distillation at the edge of 9 billion parameters
How we built a competitive coding-agent model in public: the data, the teachers, and the honest eval results. What worked, what did not, and every number we tracked.
08
Models
April 2026 / 8 min
A 4B that punches above 20B: reasoning distillation
LoRA on Qwen3-4B-Thinking, benchmarks vs base, the free leemerlabs/qwen3-4b-power alias, and the EU 27B+ roadmap.
09
Technical
28 Apr 2026 / 12 min
Building the Ring teacher mix: six models, one student
The data pipeline, teacher selection criteria, and quality filters behind Born-9B's training corpus. Why we chose six teachers and how their outputs were weighted.
10
Roadmap
26 Apr 2026 / 6 min
Qwen 3.6 and Granite 4.1: what is joining the EU gateway
Roadmap notes for Qwen3.6, Granite 4.1, planned EU pricing, and how that differs from today's Liquid + Gemma inference API.
11
Opinion
20 Apr 2026 / 5 min
Why evaluation-first is the only honest way to ship AI
Benchmark theater is easy. Evidence you can trust is hard. Here is how Born thinks about measurement, and why we publish evals before we publish claims.
12
Technical
12 Apr 2026 / 10 min
QLoRA on a single RTX 6000 Ada: what is actually possible
A practical account of running QLoRA fine-tuning on 48 GB VRAM. Memory budgets, gradient checkpointing, batch size tradeoffs, and measured throughput.
13
Practice
5 Apr 2026 / 7 min
Dataset provenance: why every training row needs a paper trail
We document where every row in Born-9B's dataset came from. This post explains the tooling, the YAML manifests, and why provenance matters more than row count.