Skinnertopia Lab for AI

Independent open model research

Open models should be able to reason

SLAI builds open models that can reason, build, work, design, explore, and collaborate, along with the products that make those abilities useful.

Latest from the lab

Journal

Research notes, model work, product releases, and direct accounts of what we are learning.

Why SLAI Exists

Local AI gave people ownership of a model, but ownership was not enough. SLAI began with a harder question: when would open intelligence become dependable work?

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Our premise

Democratizing more than intelligence.

Publishing weights is a beginning. People also need the controls, interfaces, tools, and workflows that turn open intelligence into dependable work.

Open model families

Models built for every task.

GRaPE and CRePE are developed for people who need more than an answer. They are designed to carry work through.

General Reasoning Agent

GRaPE

General Reasoning Agent for Project Exploration. A multimodal family for reasoning, coding, tools, and complex project work.

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Code Reasoning Expert

CRePE

Code Reasoning Expert for Project Exploration. Focused on agentic software work with separate control over thought and work effort.

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Products

The model is not the finish line.

SLAI builds the surfaces that let open models become useful parts of real projects.

Conversation and collaboration

GRaPE Chat

A hosted workspace for SLAI models, files, tools, artifacts, visible reasoning, and collaborative Vines.

Open GRaPE Chat
GRaPE Chat completing a research task

Agentic coding

Scribe

A terminal agent built around project exploration, deliberate work, and first-class support for GRaPE and CRePE models.

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Scribe working in a terminal

Research

Control the thought. Control the work.

Useful agents need control over both their reasoning depth and the amount of work they carry through.

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Since August 2025

Local intelligence was open, but it could not yet do the work.

SLAI began after years of watching local models promise ownership without delivering dependable agency. Qwen 2.5 and Qwen 3 showed that the gap could close.

GRaPE 1 established the direction. GRaPE 2 caught up with the competition. The lab exists to keep moving forward and to publish the products each model family deserves.

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