humans& launches Ampersand, a 'collaborator model' trained to work with people, not replace them
gharik · x · 2026-10-21
Startup humans& released Ampersand v0.1, billed as the first model trained for people to achieve more together, available to all developers via its Agents API.
The thesis: current training paradigms optimize for task completion and shallow preferences, pushing models toward autonomy and replacing human work. Good collaborators instead consider where their actions and words lead — what they cause, whom they affect, and whether they help people accomplish shared goals. Ampersand is trained with this paradigm.
Evaluation: the model is embedded in simulated groups of users with grounded goals over months-long horizons. The team reports users collaborating with Ampersand accomplished more than with Fable and other frontier models in multi-month simulations.
Built by Eric Zelikman, Yuchen He, Noah Goodman and team, following their earlier Persimmon release.
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