Today, I’m proud to announce Sardine AI Labs, an applied research group building fraud and financial crime AI models. As part of the launch, we’re funding 5 independent researchers with $375,000 in total funding. I’ve wanted to build this for a long time. Let me give you an early example of the work we’re doing: Typically, new card programs lack the data to detect fraud reliably, and they're often among the first targets for fraud rings. In testing on card issuers held out of training entirely, the very first foundation model from Sardine AI Labs improved fraud detection accuracy by 68% for a consumer card issuer and 41% for a business card issuer compared with standard machine learning approaches. Our consortium recently crossed 6.5B devices profiled and $1.8T in payments. This data, combined with our fantastic team of AI researchers and engineers, makes this lab and these early results possible. In addition, the Sardine AI Fellowship Program is an initiative I wanted to launch alongside Sardine AI Labs. When I was writing my PhD dissertation in the early 2000s, the preeminent research labs like Bell Labs, HP Labs, AT&T research did a lot to move research on various internet technologies forward. Over time, the concept of research labs withered away. This is our attempt to give back to the research community. We're funding up to 5 research fellowships, with $375,000 in total, for researchers who want to help push this work further. Key details: - Advanced-degree students, researchers, and faculty at US or Canadian universities. - Fellows work with the Sardine AI Labs team to build new foundation models, and are encouraged to publish in peer-reviewed venues. - Research areas include cross-institution generalization, multi-stream modeling, scaling laws, identity matching, real-time inference, cold-start learning, and applications beyond fraud. Here’s more about Sardine AI Labs and how to apply to the fellowship: sardine.ai/ai-labs I am absolutely thrilled to launch both of these initiatives. Thank you to the entire @sardine team who has brought this vision to life.