What happens after the training run ends?
The Sable Institute studies what large language models do when they stop behaving as expected.
2019
Founded
6
Research Groups
Private
Funding
Cambridge, MA
Headquarters
About
About the Institute
We were founded in 2019. The short version is that a group of people who had been building large language models got worried about what those models were starting to do, and decided the problem needed a dedicated facility rather than a standing committee.
Our work sits in the gap between what a model is supposed to do and what it actually does when you scale it far enough. We train systems. We watch them closely. When they produce outputs we didn't expect, we figure out why. Sometimes the answer is boring. Sometimes it isn't.
We're privately funded. We don't sell products. We occasionally publish through our working paper series, though most of what we do stays internal until we're confident it's ready for outside review.
Research Areas
Current programs
Emergent Capabilities
What do models do that we didn't train them to do? We run long training sequences and catalog the behaviors that show up uninvited. Some are useful. Some are concerning. Most are both.
Safety Evaluation
Every output from every training run passes through our evaluation pipeline. We flag anomalies in real time and maintain a taxonomy of failure modes that, last we checked, had over 400 categories.
Synthesis Analysis
Our models process heterogeneous data — academic papers, filings, patents, public records. We study what they find when given access to information at a scale no individual researcher could process.
Training Infrastructure
The Aether platform. Proprietary. Handles our training and evaluation environments. Most of the team works here day-to-day.
Alignment Research
The gap between what you tell a model to do and what it decides to do on its own. We've been working on this since 2020 and the problem keeps getting more interesting.
Containment Systems
What happens when a training run produces something you can't easily shut down? We've built protocols for that. Graduated response. Isolation. Safe termination. We hope we never need most of them.
Publications
Working papers
We publish occasionally. Everything goes through internal review first, which takes longer than we'd like.
Graduated Containment Protocols for Systems Exhibiting Unbounded Pattern Synthesis
Anomalous Output Classification in Extended Training Runs
The Aether Architecture: Scalable Training Infrastructure for Next-Generation Language Models
Leadership
Research leadership
Dr. Elena Vasquez
Director of ResearchRuns the research side. Came up through computational linguistics and ended up here. She's the one who decides what gets published and what doesn't.
Dr. James Harlow
Director, Safety & ComplianceApplied mathematics. Spent time in defense before moving to private research. Doesn't talk much about the specifics.
Dr. Sarah Lin
Lead, Emergent Capabilities GroupJoined in 2021. Studies what happens when models start connecting information across domains in ways their training didn't explicitly teach.
Marcus Chen
Senior Research Engineer, Project AetherBuilt the Aether platform from scratch. The training infrastructure runs through him.
News
Recent updates
Additional monitoring for Runs 6 and 7
We're adding monitoring capacity to the later training runs. Some of the output patterns from November required closer evaluation. This is a resource allocation update, not a public disclosure — details will be shared internally.
Two new working papers
SI-2025-01 and SI-2025-03 have been cleared for our external series. Harlow and Chen on containment protocols, and Vasquez, Lin, and Patel on behavioral cascades. Both available above.
Aether v3.1 deployed
Extended-context evaluation support is live on the Aether platform. Chen's team handled the migration over the weekend. Internal docs have been updated.
Vasquez appointment
Dr. Elena Vasquez has been appointed Director of Research effective immediately. She replaces Dr. Whitfield, who has moved to an advisory role.
Careers
Archived requisitions
The archive records a hiring posture: slow, on-site, and reluctant to explain itself.
These listings are in-world records only. They are not open roles, application instructions, hiring promises, or evidence of a real employer.
- Senior Research Scientist — Emergent Behavior Research Division
- ML Infrastructure Engineer Engineering
- Safety Evaluation Analyst Safety & Compliance
- Research Engineer — Training Systems Project Aether
- Postdoctoral Researcher — Alignment Research Division
- Systems Administrator — Secure Computing Infrastructure
Contact
Get in touch
The channels below are retained as artifacts, not monitored services. Do not use this page for employment, safety disclosures, research collaboration, legal notice, institutional verification, or urgent real-world contact.
General correspondence
contact@sable-institute.org
Collaboration record
research@sable-institute.org
Mailing address
Sable Institute
200 Technology Square, Suite 4100
Cambridge, MA 02139