native_research_llms
Registry of LLMs pretrained from scratch by universities, non-profit research institutes, and national laboratories
Overview
An index of foundation models trained natively, from scratch, on their own data and tokenizer, by academic and research institutions. Universities come first; research institutes, national labs, and public consortia are tracked alongside.
Foundation model development is dominated by well-funded commercial labs, and data opacity, licensing constraints, and architectural gatekeeping come with it. In response, universities and other public institutions have pretrained large language models from a tabula rasa state: random weights, own corpus, own tokenizer, auditable end to end.
Entries marked ⚠ carry a caveat worth reading before you rely on them, usually a restrictive license or a documented access constraint.
No commercial partner, no corporate-donated compute. University teams on university or public compute. This is the headline ranking.
From the project’s README on GitHub.
At a glance
| Repository | Kentucky-Open-Science/native_research_llms |
|---|---|
| Research area | Language models & AI tooling |
| Primary language | Ruby |
| License | CC0-1.0 |
| Stars / forks | 3 / 0 |
| Open issues and pull requests | 0 |
| Created | 2026-07-16 |
| Last push | 2026-09-22 |
| Default branch | main |
| Topics | large-language-models |
What the README covers
- Contents
- Rankings
- Academic-only
- University-led, commercially backed
- Universities
- Fully open and reproducible
- Multilingual and regional
- Biomedical and clinical
- Small and efficient
- Alternative architectures and objectives
- Research institutes and national labs
- Fully open and reproducible
- Multilingual and regional
- Small and efficient
- Alternative architectures and objectives
- Public research consortia
- Related
- Contributing
Top contributors
- @codybum (13 commits)
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Archived
Code assoicated with https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01727
Get the code
git clone https://github.com/Kentucky-Open-Science/native_research_llms.git