ABOUT
Frontier intelligence you fully own
Our story
The conviction behind the work
We started Black Sheep AI on a plain observation. The best models kept getting larger and further out of reach, locked behind someone else's API on someone else's servers. If you cared where your data went, you were out of options.
We think that is backwards. A hospital, a bank, a defence agency, a firm with fifty years of hard-won documents, none of them should have to hand their crown jewels to a third party to get useful AI. So we set out to make frontier models small enough to run on hardware you already own, and honest enough that you can prove what they do.
The work is research first. We compress models with 400B+ parameters down to a size that fits on a single GPU instance or a Mac Studio, and the compressed model holds the full-precision scores it started with. Then we ship it, on premises, air-gapped, or at the edge, wherever your data has to stay.
We are a team of researchers and deployment engineers working from Australia and New Zealand. We help nations and enterprises build AI capability they own outright, from the weights on disk to the box that runs them.
Ngā Wai e Rua: the story behind our markPRINCIPLES
Principles we don't bend
Original research, not wrappers
Every capability we offer comes out of our own research. We don't put a logo on someone else's model and call it a product. We invent the method, test it, and deploy it.Evidence over claims
We publish our methods and our numbers. When we say a compressed model matches its full-precision score, there is a report with the measurement behind it. Over twenty articles are already out in the open.Runs on hardware you control
If it needs a cloud we operate, it isn't finished. Everything we build targets infrastructure you control, down to air-gapped rooms with no network at all.Honest about limitations
Every report states accuracy and its limits in full. We tell you what a model can't do as plainly as what it can. Research that only reports its wins is marketing.
Products
What we put in your hands
Bounded AI Architecture (BAA): three layers, each doing one job well, all of them running behind your own firewall.
Paddock
The Knowledge Plane for AI. Your manuals, policies, and knowledge held in permissioned Knowledge Modules, made answerable with exact citations and table-precise answers. It runs on your hardware and nothing leaves your boundary.
Ram
The reasoning layer. A frontier model compressed to the size you name, reasoning kept and certified, bound on top of the plane. When a better model ships, bind that one instead. Shepherd compresses, certifies and deploys it into your infrastructure.
Watchman
The governance layer. Watchman logs every module permission, verifies that the model bound on top is what it claims to be, and certifies every build against five measured gates, with evidence-grade reports and AI-BOM attestations.
Frameworks
The frameworks behind the work
Two bodies of thinking shape what we build and how we tell customers to deploy it. We publish both so you can argue with them.
