Eric Hartford

Open models

Eric Hartford introduced Samantha, a series of fine-tuned chat models released on Hugging Face in several sizes, and announced Dolphin, an open dataset and series of instruction-tuned language models modeled on the approach of Microsoft's Orca paper. Hartford's announcement says each Dolphin model is released under the license of the base model it is trained on.⁴⁵

The Dolphin project's Hugging Face organization, which lists Hartford as a team member, continues to publish Dolphin fine-tunes of open-weight base models. Dolphin X1 Trinity Nano, for example, is built on Arcee AI's Trinity Nano and released under the Apache 2.0 license.²³

Quixi.AI

Hartford founded Quixi.AI, which its site describes as an independent AI lab building a private-AI stack layer by layer. Its projects include QuixiCore, a set of native kernel libraries for several hardware backends; SlimServe, an inference engine for a curated set of open models; Hexis, a Postgres-based cognitive architecture; and With, a systems programming language.¹

The site says Hartford previously worked at Microsoft, AWS and eBay, and that Quixi.AI offers commissioned model training and data curation. Hartford is also writing a book on local and on-premises AI.¹

Work and contributions

• Dolphin Open weights

  Hartford's site says Hartford created the Dolphin open models, and the Dolphin organization on Hugging Face lists Hartford as a team member. Its releases include Dolphin X1 Trinity Nano, a fine-tune of Arcee AI's Trinity Nano whose model card gives the Apache 2.0 license.¹²³

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Former employee; the role is not stated, Microsoft¹
• Former employee; the role is not stated, Amazon Web Services (AWS)¹

Where they work

• Quixi.AI 1 person in the wiki

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