Interview: Breaking into AI Research and Open Source Models
Madisonkanna · x · 2026-07-15
This is an in-depth interview on how to become an AI researcher. The guest, Charlie O’Neill, co-founded Parsed with the goal of building specialized open-source models capable of outperforming frontier lab models on specific tasks.
Key topics include why he dropped out of Oxford to start a company, the origins of Parsed, why having a "unique perspective" acts as a personal moat, the competition between open-source and closed-source models, the importance of post-training and fine-tuning, and why specialized models still hold opportunities from a "Big Token" perspective.
Related event: Parsed Co-Founder: No PhD Needed for AI Research(4 posts)→
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