At the close of 2023, alphabell completed its seventh full year of operation. We mark these years sparingly. The shape of the lab is still recognisably what it was at founding — four research axes, federated compute, signed-proposal governance, paired interpretability where capabilities are dual-use — and seven years is roughly the period over which most things that look stable in a research lab actually turn out to be stable or not.
A few numbers from the year. We ran fourteen RSI-axis runs, two of which triggered the pre-registered stopping condition. We published twenty-one cell-level reports to the internal index, of which sixteen were tier-1 (immediate release) and four were tier-2 (delayed). We grew the long-tenured contributor pool from 119 to 138, and the wider contributor pool from approximately 350 to approximately 400. We added one anchor (Hong Kong stewardship rotated to its new term) and declined one prospective sovereign-research partner whose terms we could not accept.
The structural milestone of the year, in our view, was the standardisation of the modification-under-review (MUR) protocol that now governs every RSI-axis run. The protocol existed in 2022 in less mature form; its 2023 version is the one that has held up across two stopping events and that we now publish openly as 25/05.
Less visible but more important to the lab's day-to-day operation: the cross-axis methodology review pool achieved full quarterly cadence in 2023, with every quarterly review having more than 40% turnout among long-tenured contributors. We have, in the lab's history, run review pools where the meaningful work was done by three or four people; the difference between that and "more than 50 contributors with eyes on the methodology" is substantial.
We also said no to several things this year. Three sovereign-research partner overtures were declined: two for jurisdictional reasons, one for terms involving co-authorship rights on alphabell-led publications that the prospective funder would have had — which we do not accept. Two licensing inquiries were declined for similar reasons.
2024 will, on the current schedule, see the public release of the agent substrate v1, the second open release of the MUR protocol with a v2 amendment, and the first delayed-release report of the year (24-13).
Seven years is roughly the period over which most things that look stable in a research lab actually turn out to be stable or not.
We are conscious that the seventh year of a project is sometimes the year of complacency. We have tried to resist the pull. The structural commitments remain non-optional. The protocol layer remains the thing we are most willing to litigate internally. We pay the coordination tax on purpose.
For external readers: most of what alphabell does is invisible from outside, including from outside the lab. The internal-index summaries, the proposal queue, the pairing records — these are the substrate on which the published work rests, and they are typically more interesting than what gets released. We are testing ways to expose more of that without compromising the substantive constraints that justify the staged-release policy. Whether that experiment will continue depends on what we learn.
Contributor demographics, briefly: the long-tenured pool gained 19 contributors during 2023, with the largest single source being the 2022-Q3 Colombo cohort (six members of which crossed the 24-month tenure mark in 2023). We lost four contributors to departures — three to academic positions, one to a non-AI role — and we credit each in the appropriate cell record. Cell formations: four new cells (riemann-44, noether-12, cantor-18, dirichlet-09); two dissolutions and one merger; net change of +1 active cell. Of the four new cells, three are in axes other than the agentic axis, which reverses a trend of the last three years where agentic-axis cell formation outpaced the rest.
This retrospective is signed by the Bay Area anchor steward on behalf of the long-tenured contributor pool that voted to authorise its publication. Specific corrections — historical, structural, factual — should be raised through the standard correction channel.
For the protocol details behind anything mentioned above, see /governance and /charter. For the structural commitments, /about.