Stanford
academicStanford's AI surface spans SAIL, the HAI institute, and the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) — the university lab that comes closest to running a frontier-style training operation. CRFM's Marin "open lab", started by Percy Liang and David Hall in 2024 and developed since 2025 with Open Athena, pretrains fully open models from scratch in JAX (Marin 8B, and Marin 32B — the strongest fully open base model at its release, beating OLMo 2 32B), with every experiment landing as a public PR on the Levanter training stack, plus the Delphi open scaling suite.
The systems and methods lines are equally load-bearing: Chris Ré's Hazy Research (FlashAttention lineage) now ships the ThunderKittens/HipKittens kernel DSLs; Hashimoto and Liang's groups produced s1 test-time scaling, Alpaca before it, and the pretraining-science pair on optimizers and data efficiency; Stanford NLP maintains DSPy (36K★); OVAL's STORM agent has 30K★; and the MIMI group builds medical imaging FMs (Merlin, Nature 2026). HELM remains the reference holistic eval.
The spin-out boundary is the entry's defining attribution problem: Liang and Ré co-founded Together AI, Fei-Fei Li runs World Labs, Finn co-founded Physical Intelligence, and Chatbot Arena (joint with Berkeley) incorporated as LMArena — company output stays with the companies; Stanford keeps the original dated releases.
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People
- Percy Liang Google Scholar — Associate Professor, CS; Director, CRFM; co-leads the Marin open lab (with Open Athena) (formerly Co-Founder, Together AI)
- Christopher Ré Google Scholar — Professor, CS; Hazy Research (formerly Co-Founder, Together AI, SambaNova, Snorkel AI)
- Tatsunori Hashimoto Google Scholar — Assistant Professor, CS
- Fei-Fei Li Google Scholar — Professor; Co-Director, HAI; Co-Founder & CEO, World Labs
- Chelsea Finn Google Scholar — Associate Professor, CS; IRIS Lab; Co-Founder, Physical Intelligence