About studio1804
An independent AI research lab building the tooling for community-owned, culturally-grounded technology.
studio1804 takes on novel problems that center on community — building the tooling that makes community-owned, culturally-grounded AI possible.
We're aspiring to a world where communities own their language infrastructure, their cultural archives, their platforms, and the creative sovereignty over their own expression. Where AI enhances and preserves culture rather than extracting from it.
That future requires infrastructure that doesn't yet fully exist. We're building it — layer by layer, starting with the communities closest to us.
What We're Building
Language
Most of the world's languages have no serious AI infrastructure — no models, no training data, no embeddings. We're building the tooling that changes that, one language at a time.
Cultural Memory
Every community holds archives — handwritten records, newspapers, oral histories, legal codes — that exist physically but are functionally inaccessible. We're building the pipeline that makes them searchable, citable, and alive.
Creative Sovereignty
AI is extracting from cultural expression without attribution or compensation. We're working on the provenance and attribution infrastructure that routes value back to the communities whose knowledge and creativity make it possible.
Cooperative Infrastructure
Platforms extract value from communities. The alternative isn't just open source — it's ownership. We build the legal, technical, and governance tooling for platforms that communities govern rather than rent.
Coordination
Diaspora communities hold enormous collective economic and cultural power that goes uncoordinated because the tools don't exist. We're building the infrastructure for dispersed communities to act together — shared resources, mutual aid, cultural investment.
Values
Community Ownership
Technology should be governed by the people it serves. We build systems that communities own and control.
Cultural Vitality
Languages, histories, and creative expression are living assets — not artifacts to archive.
Sovereignty
Communities should control their own data, tools, and knowledge infrastructure — not simply have read access.
Collective Agency
Dispersed communities hold more power together than apart. We build tools for coordination without sacrificing autonomy.
Honest Infrastructure
We publish our methods, name our limitations, and run on hardware we control.
Reproducibility
The work is documented and transferable. Any community should be able to take what we build and adapt it.
Work With Us
We're open to partnerships with researchers, cultural institutions, domain experts, and organizations aligned with community-governed technology.