Prime Intellect, a San Francisco AI startup, has launched the Environments Hub, an open platform for building and sharing reinforcement learning (RL) environments. The aim is to counter the closed systems built by major AI labs.
Prime Intellect calls interactive training environments a critical bottleneck for the next wave of AI progress. In these environments, AI agents learn by interacting with rule-based worlds, receiving new states and rewards for their actions. Reinforcement learning only makes sense, the company argues, when models face dynamic situations - otherwise, it's "just math."
Prime Intellect sees a trend where large AI labs pour millions into developing and acquiring proprietary RL environments. This push toward privatization, the company says, makes it harder for open-source efforts to build competitive AI models.
The Environments Hub is positioned as an open alternative. The company wants to build open platforms and models, not locked behind the walled gardens of big labs.
Crowdsourcing RL environments for INTELLECT-3
Over time, Prime Intellect plans to use the Environments Hub as a data engine for its next big open-source model, INTELLECT-3. The company describes INTELLECT-3 as a "fully open, state-of-the-art agentic model" trained on data from contributed RL environments.
To drive the creation of targeted environments, Prime Intellect has posted a list of bounties with cash rewards. They're looking for environments to evaluate code quality, support long-running tasks with filesystem integration, and enable creative writing. The goal is to not only build a more capable model but also lower infrastructure barriers for developers.
Prime Intellect was founded by CEO Vincent Weisser and CTO Johannes Hagemann. Weisser previously worked in decentralized science (DeSci), while Hagemann scaled LLM training at Aleph Alpha. The company is committed to decentralized AI, pooling compute resources, training models across distributed systems, and sharing results with the community.
Prime Intellect says it has raised $20.5 million from investors including Founders Fund, Andrej Karpathy, and Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. Earlier this year, the company released the decentralized INTELLECT-2 model.
