NORBURY

Norbury Labs is a research lab working out how to keep your artificial intelligence in check.

Mohammad Ali Shehral

Open research, idea stage. Nothing for sale.

Same city. Two futures.

Hold U to peek at the other state

Illustration.

Night. The same city in rain, with drones circling the towers.
Without NorburyCURFEW IN EFFECT · DRONES ACTIVE · ALL CITIZENS LOGGED · COMPLIANCE NORMAL

Without Norbury

  • CURFEW IN EFFECT
  • DRONES ACTIVE
  • ALL CITIZENS LOGGED
  • COMPLIANCE NORMAL

01

Mission

AI is leaving the chat window. Companies are putting it to work, families are bringing it home, and humanoid robots are giving it hands. Each step gives it more of the world to act on.

Norbury Labs is built on one conviction: alignment, getting AI to do what people intend, is the biggest problem in AI. The systems coming next may outthink the people who check them. Getting those wrong is not a mistake anyone gets to redo.

The lab exists to keep artificial intelligence in check. It starts small, with checks on the models people already run, and publishes what it finds.

The name

Whisper Norbury.

In the eighteen nineties, Sherlock Holmes took a case in Norbury. A husband feared his wife was hiding something. From a few facts Holmes built a confident theory of blackmail and an earlier husband back from the dead. He was wrong. The truth was kinder and stranger than his deduction.

Holmes did not bury the miss. He asked Watson for a favour, the kind only a friend can do. Whenever Holmes grew too sure of himself, Watson had one instruction.

“Whisper Norbury in my ear.”

Norbury Labs reads the case as a design rule. An intelligence that is never reminded of its misses stops checking itself. The systems coming next may outthink the people who check them, so the reminder has to be built in. Norbury Labs is the whisper.

Street level. Rain, trash and barricades under a drone's searchlight.
Without NorburyIDENTITY CHECK AHEAD · GATHERING PROHIBITED · LOITERING FLAGGED · KEEP MOVING

Without Norbury

  • IDENTITY CHECK AHEAD
  • GATHERING PROHIBITED
  • LOITERING FLAGGED
  • KEEP MOVING

Street level.Illustration.

02

Vision

Illustration.

With Norbury

A city of white glass and green on a bright afternoon. Parks run between the towers, and gardens climb the rooftops. People cross the boulevards, picnic on the grass and wait for the tram. Flying cars glide between the buildings, trailing soft light. A river runs clear under its bridges, and the tallest tower catches the sun. Nothing in the sky is watching anyone. It is an ordinary day, and that is the point.

Without Norbury

The same city at night. Rain falls through smog and pools on the asphalt. The towers are darker now, streaked with grime and lit by neon and red warning lights. Surveillance drones patrol between them, sweeping searchlights across the windows. Giant screens on the facades watch the street below. Trash piles against barricades, and almost no one is outside. The tallest tower stands dark over all of it.

Norbury Labs shows the same city twice on purpose. The towers, the river and the bridges do not change; only the fate does. These are the two futures that people in AI picture when superintelligence comes up, and neither is a forecast. No lab can promise the bright one. The difference between them is whether anyone kept the intelligence in check.

03

What we build

  • Studies of AI models, the data they learn from and the harnesses around them, on the research page.

  • Plain-language posts that explain one part of an AI system at a time, in the Align your AI series.

  • The ways AI goes wrong, from the model to its tools, context and devices, each with real cases and what people do about it, in the problem space.

  • Tools, benchmarks and courses for checking AI, other people's and the lab's alike, listed one line each in the resources directory.

  • The lab's own solutions, listed with its research as they are released, at alignyourai.com.

04

Founder

Ali Shehral is the founder of Norbury Labs.