About AIR
From difficult questions
to workable systems.
Advanced Intelligence Refinery is an independent research and engineering company. We develop standards, evaluate complex systems, and design and build specialized technology that helps people make better-informed decisions.
Research informs our standards and how we assess systems. What we learn guides the systems we build, and the work of building them tests our ideas in practice.
Our approach
Before recommending new technology, we examine what an organization needs to accomplish and where its current systems fall short. That gives us a basis for deciding what is worth changing.
Standards
We develop standards for examining claims and their supporting evidence. The criteria are published so readers can use them, challenge them, and suggest improvements.
Explore the Rhetorical Transparency Standard ↗Assessments
We examine an organization’s technology, infrastructure, workflows, and movement of information. The result is an independent account of its constraints and failure points, with prioritized recommendations for what to address and why.
An assessment can stand on its own or establish the requirements for an engineering project.
Research
We study how AI affects the way people assess information. That work informs our standards and the tools we build. We publish our reasoning so others can examine it and test our conclusions.
Read The Refinement Problem ↗Systems
We design, build, and deploy bespoke systems, including local AI, analytical software, and specialized technical infrastructure. Our work covers the requirements, architecture, implementation, and deployment.
We start with efficient models and existing hardware wherever practical. We favor systems that run in your own environment and continue functioning independently, including air-gapped deployments where isolation is required.
Built to keep
We favor direct purchases and commissioned deployments: software you can install and keep using, with control over its operation.
A subscription or metered API should earn its place in a project. When an external service is genuinely useful, we make the dependency, ongoing costs, and data handling clear.
Your data stays yours
We never sell your data. Ever.
Our local systems are designed to operate without telemetry or behavioral tracking, and without sending us your documents, prompts, or activity. Where a project needs an external service, we explain what information it receives and why.
Thoughtful computing
Computing has physical costs: electricity, water, and pressure on shared infrastructure. Those costs belong in engineering decisions.
We favor smaller models when they do the job, avoid unnecessary processing, and make useful work of hardware people already own. We consider resource use and dependence on external infrastructure from the start.
Engagements
AIR accepts select research, assessment, consulting, and engineering engagements. We begin by understanding what you need to accomplish, what is getting in the way, and what a useful result would look like.
Sometimes an existing tool or a change to the way a team works is enough. We recommend those options when they fit.
When the problem calls for something that does not yet exist… we build.
Tell us what you’re working on.
[email protected]