Frontier spaces
Library of AI-lexandria
What are you working on? What are you learning? Imagine that your session with Claude Code has kicked off and you are talking to a new friend you made last week. You are both sitting at the frontier library where Anthropic has rolled out access to Fable—the only place in the world where you can get access. It’s a visit to the future and it’s much more social and human than we all might have thought it would be.
Constraints can spark creativity. That Fable, the world’s current frontier AI model, is not currently accessible due to export restrictions is a major constraint. As a result of the restriction, we should think about a creative way of providing access to the newest frontier AI model.
The greatest library of the ancient world, the Library of Alexandria, provides a way to think about an in-person experience that would dramatically change the landscape around frontier AI.
Anthropic can open up a physical library space where people could go and access Fable (or the latest frontier model) only while at the library. It’s the most modern manifestation of an ancient space: the reading room. Adjacent to the reading rooms, you could have discussion halls and salons.
Today, as we adjust to life with powerful AI impacting us at work and at home, there are some desires that are coming to the forefront. There is a clearer view of what being on the cutting edge and living in the future looks like. There is also a community seeking going on—primarily online—for making sure they are on that cutting edge or at least not falling far behind.
We want to live on the cutting edge with technology, even if not everyone wants the societal impact of that. We seek human connections and want to share more than ever before. We want help or companionship in exploring the frontier. How you use AI is the modern equivalent of finding your way with telephone etiquette in the post-Alexander Graham Bell period. We’re all figuring it out and the etiquette is unevenly distributed. The technology isn’t going anywhere—so let’s talk to each other and figure out how to use it right.1
Have you tried setting up Claude Code like this? What are you trying to do? These questions would hum around the spaces. Of course, space would be available for discussion and the right amount of mixing to be interesting. Writers meshing with engineers, business with consumer, investor with entrepreneur. Today, our concepts for what you do with AI are incredibly siloed based on your prior experiences. A physical space breaks out from that and brings together different interests in a way that could be quite stimulating. This is diametrically different from how a lot of people use AI today: either completely alone or on a floor with many people from their company. Sharing notes on X about the experience is not the same as engaging in the practice in real life sitting next to others focused on a range of pursuits. Some of the human ingenuity will surely be applied to organize the space for optimal cross-pollination. A very human and social endeavor to make something grander in partnership with AI than could otherwise be achieved alone.
That you have to make a trip is significant. Scholars took pilgrimages to Alexandria for the library. It presupposes thought and planning and understanding of the space you are making for AI in your life. Of course, more generic, less advanced AI would be easily available wherever, whenever. The fact that the most advanced frontier model isn’t available everywhere forces us to think that much more about what we want to do with it and how we want to interface.
The Library of Alexandria had some peculiarities that wouldn’t be recognizable to modern library-goers. Access was very limited and controlled fully. There was no checking out the scrolls from the library.
Apropos of today’s LLMs, when you came into the harbor of Alexandria as a scholar, your scrolls of knowledge were copied for use in the library. They took your knowledge and copied it in order to grant you access to the library. This, while fostering a community of scholars, made the library better with each visitor. There was a realpolitik behind it that of course has been recreated with the foundational model companies today who train on your data. We now know how this can compound.2 It’s revealing that the trading of data for access was entrenched in the time of the Library of Alexandria. That doesn’t mean it is pleasant or comforting—more of an iron law that can be relied on at certain moments of history to aggregate knowledge and power at critical transitions.3
As customers, you want to feel that connection and openness to business. Having an in-person connection goes beyond the time that you spend in the library—it lingers and sustains with memories and emotions. You have touched all the senses of that brand and you feel like you know it on a different level than a run-of-the-mill online model server. If successful, it elevates beyond the brand to the embrace of the technology itself and the value of visiting the cutting edge. There is a significant difference now between what we saw and experienced with Fable and the next best model available. For some, that is worth a pilgrimage.
Let’s look at the negatives. Gating access to the forefront of technology could lead to real splintering and cross-country issues if in person is required. It isn’t like this would be undoing the access-anywhere mantra of the internet. That would remain and this is additive on top, nothing taken away from where we are today. Before we get concerned about a few libraries in coastal elite areas, there would be plenty of potential to scale this well beyond a few cities. Sure, it might start in San Francisco, but it could travel from there. Here the analogy would be some grand libraries, local ones, and cheaper, available everywhere non-frontier models.
There would be some that fully embrace the libraries and some that would, for cost, time, hassle, avoid them entirely. We have to reckon with different diffusion of technology today as it is. Perhaps this trade will make that more clear and bring it to the forefront for discussion.
We already sit with the Library of Alexandria bargain in today’s LLMs. They have trained on our data (well, not necessarily ours, but collectively ours). Yes, there are ways to avoid the foundational model companies from training on your data, but this trade has already happened. We can sit with that consideration every time we walk into the library. It’s cleaner actually. Everything that I do here will go toward improving the next model. There is no ambiguity and no chance to be surprised retroactively. There is a sprinkling of a because in there as well: security requires we monitor activity in the library, so once we are scanning, we are close to training anyway. The because helps the trade go down a bit easier.
This concept could come together quickly, which itself is an indicator of the timelessness of the demand to be at the forefront. There are some natural partners who would benefit tremendously from being associated with a project like this and would likely fund much of the cost. There are, of course, existing library spaces in some of the major hubs that would be natural fits. MIT & Harvard would register this as a major win.
Podcast studios with a background on the reading floor are not something the ancient scholars would have imagined, but we can. This is the AI version of Jim Cramer’s Mad Money recording at the NYSE. This need not be a dark wood setting with dust on all the books. We can bring some human creativity to the design. There are lots of options for paid entry prices, additional services around the model access, trainings and seminars, and a host of ways to create unique experiences different from casually accessing lesser models from your couch at home or your desk at the office.
These institutions and spaces were built to address very human needs prior to AI. There are some real questions on the value of our current educational structures for the next decades. This effort would sketch a potential pathway for top learning institutions. The library concept plays off of nostalgia (for college grads) and can draw a lineage back to ancient times of learning. That’s powerful human emotion at play that benefits from a modern revisit.
There could be different access levels: either fully open for citizens and permanent residents or usable by anyone with exfiltration filters and monitoring.4 Fable is, at present by order, limited to American citizens and permanent residents but isn’t publicly disseminated at all by Anthropic while it works with the government to resolve concerns. Let’s take the restrictions as a given, and not likely to disappear quickly.5 Whether the restriction is or isn’t justified is beside the point for companies; it exists and needs to be navigated. Even if these dynamics change and it can be more widely made available, there is room for frontier spaces. The spaces can be used for early test groups, product innovations like Cowork rather than only models, and vertical-specific developments like for finance in the New York location or biotech for Boston. The community elements and human drivers don’t disappear.
We would benefit from creating that separation in life from access to the highest-powered AI and not being tied to physical space. We want to be tied to place for certain things. We want to make friends while we wait for Claude Code. We want to sit in spaces that were purpose-designed for the experience. We are trying to find the duality of having access to unbelievable technology while keeping the agency of being able to turn it off when we’d like—to assert that final control. The AI on the frontier works for us, and firmly not the other way around.
There is a fundamental trade being made, just like the trade the scholars visiting Alexandria made. The physical spaces fuse the opportunities and necessity of human ingenuity and design to enhance the AI experience being served within their walls. The museums of the past were built as complements of the amazing works of art inside. The museums were made by different hands and conceived by different minds. The mix is what makes it special and transcendent.
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Then: no calls in the middle of the night, please. Now: don’t just send me the output of some long chat you had with AI, please.
Alexandria was lost to fire and invasion—today we have offsite backups and server redundancies.
In Alexandria, there were huge efforts and sums expended to acquire some scrolls to be placed in the Library. This was in addition to the trades of access for scrolls. This is all an echo of paying for training data as well as trading for it.
Monitoring has been mostly solved here. In public libraries, they figured out how to curtail pornography.
Or if the restrictions return during a subsequent model release.