Naive AI open-sources its first model and puts AI-led AI research at the center
Naive AI, a startup founded by Dai Jifeng’s team, has released and open-sourced its first model, Naive-N0.5-Flash, positioning it as both a product built with AI assistance and a model trained to take on AI research work itself. The company’s technical report lays out a development process in which researchers define goals, constraints, and evaluation criteria, while AI systems handle large parts of implementation, experimentation, analysis, and validation.
The release comes as major labs have started publishing hard numbers on how much AI is already contributing to model research. Anthropic recently said 26% of its internal AI research work is now “Claude-led,” up from less than 1% in February. OpenAI said it had reached its “automated research intern” goal, with about 3.1 agent workdays running in parallel for every human workday in its research team. Against that backdrop, Naive AI is presenting a more explicit version of the same direction: building a research system where AI is involved from day one in creating the next generation of models.
Naive-N0.5-Flash has 309B total parameters, 15.5B active parameters, native 1M-token context, MIT-licensed weights and inference code, and API pricing disclosed in yuan. The report also details two case studies, NaiveRT and AutoWM, showing how the model was used in runtime optimization and world-model research, alongside benchmark results in paper reproduction, machine learning engineering, post-training, coding, and long-horizon tasks.