Charlie O’Neill

I run Base Labs, a research lab by Baseten that works to advance and democratise open-source intelligence. We study how models learn, remember, specialise and get cheaper to run, and we publish all of it, including what fails. I got here by cofounding Parsed to build specialised open-source models that beat the frontier labs. We raised a seed, were acquired by Baseten at the end of 2025, and I ran their training team, training bespoke models for one company at a time. Base Labs takes the same bet at the scale of the ecosystem: open environments, data, recipes and models that anyone can build on.

Before all that I was briefly a DPhil student in machine learning at Oxford under Jakob Foerster, a General Sir John Monash Scholar, and a Tuckwell Scholar at ANU, and I cofounded Rake News for personalised, debiased news with language models. I like basketball, writing, and reading anything my mum recommends.