# Frontier lab

> An organisation building some of the most capable AI models in the world, at the leading edge.

Source: https://www.superintelligence.com.au/glossary/frontier-lab/

A frontier lab is a company or research organisation that trains some of the most capable AI models available. The group is small, because building such systems takes very large amounts of money, specialised chips, data and expert staff. The exact list is a matter of judgement and changes over time.

The term matters because these organisations set the pace of AI progress and make many of the decisions that affect everyone else: what to build, how to test it, whether to release it, and how much to disclose. Governments and researchers therefore watch them closely and often ask them to make commitments about safety testing and reporting.

There are disagreements about how much trust they deserve. Some argue that their commercial incentives push them to move quickly and share little. Others say they are also the ones doing much of the leading safety research, and that close involvement is needed to understand the risks. Some labs also publish their models’ inner workings for anyone to use, while others keep them private. Which approach is safer is itself debated.

Related: https://www.superintelligence.com.au/glossary/frontier-model.md, https://www.superintelligence.com.au/glossary/compute.md, https://www.superintelligence.com.au/glossary/evaluation.md, https://www.superintelligence.com.au/glossary/alignment.md