Organisation
Conjecture
An alignment-focused startup pursuing "cognitive emulation" — bounded, auditable AI systems it argues are safer than scaling ever-larger models.
Conjecture is a London-based AI startup, founded in 2022 by Connor Leahy, Sid Black and Gabriel Alfour, several of whom came from the open-source collective EleutherAI. It began as an applied alignment-research company and has since concentrated on what it calls "cognitive emulation" — an approach that aims to build AI systems whose reasoning is bounded and auditable rather than open-ended, which the company argues is a safer path than scaling ever-larger models. Chief executive Connor Leahy has become a prominent public voice warning that uncontrolled frontier AI is dangerous. Conjecture remains a small player relative to the frontier labs, and its influence lies more in its arguments about control than in widely used products.
- Category
- Safety & alignment research
- Founded
- 2022
- HQ
- London, UK
- Key people
- Connor Leahy, Gabriel Alfour