Why we'll never train a foundation model
Every AI company is pressured to build its own model. We made the opposite promise on day one. Here's why neutrality is the product.
In almost every investor meeting during our seed round, someone asked when we'd train our own model. It's a reasonable question. Models are where the attention is, and owning one feels like owning the moat.
Our answer was always the same: never. Here's why.
You can't be the player and the referee
Our customers use Probe to decide which model to trust with their users. If we sold a model too, every eval we ran and every guardrail we shipped would carry a conflict of interest. Would our red team go easy on our own model? Would our benchmarks quietly favor it?
Even if the answer were no, customers would have to take our word for it. Neutrality is only valuable if it's structural.
A safety layer that competes with the thing it's protecting isn't a safety layer. It's a sales channel.
Our customers switch models constantly
The average Probe customer has changed their primary model provider 1.7 times in the last year, usually for cost or capability. Each switch is risky. We want to be the constant that makes switching safe, not another vendor trying to lock them in.
Focus is a feature
Training frontier models takes enormous capital and attention. Every dollar and every engineer we'd spend there is one we wouldn't spend making Guard faster, Red Team sharper, or Evals more trustworthy. We'd rather be the best in the world at one hard problem.
What we do build
To be precise: we do train small, specialized classifiers that power Probe Guard, like injection detectors and PII taggers. They're narrow tools, measured in millions of parameters, that do one job fast. They will never generate text for your users, and they're never trained on customer data outside that customer's tenant.
The promise
Lanbo Lab will not train, fine-tune for resale, or sell a general-purpose foundation model. It's in our customer contracts. If we ever change our minds, you'll have the right to walk away.
We think that's what a testing company should look like. If you agree, come build it with us.