{"version":1,"id":"eric-hartford","title":"Eric Hartford","summary":"Eric Hartford is a person that is an applied AI researcher and software developer who creates and releases open-source AI models and has held research and engineering roles at multiple AI and tech companies.","content":"**Eric Hartford** is an artificial intelligence researcher and software engineer with a background spanning applied AI research, open-source language models, and software development. He is the Chief Scientist at Lazarus AI and previously held research roles at TensorWave, Abacus.AI, and Convai, as well as software engineering positions at Microsoft, eBay, and Amazon Web Services. [\\[2\\]](#cite-id-no9s80t40t) \n\n## Education\n\nHartford graduated from Pacific Lutheran University with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science in 2002. He then earned his Master’s in Computing and Software Systems from the University of Washington in 2005. [\\[1\\]](#cite-id-ooivvvwpx6) \n\n## Career\n\nHartford began his career as a Firmware QA Technician at Intel from 2001 to 2002 and later worked as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Washington from 2002 to 2004. He joined The Boeing Company as an Embedded Software Engineer II in May 2004, working on software development, interface documentation, integration, and testing until March 2006. He then spent several years in software testing and development, first as a Software Design Engineer in Test at Microsoft from March 2006 to April 2009, followed by roles at Zillow and Verdiem Corporation. He returned to Microsoft in April 2010 as a Software Development Engineer in Test and later became a Software Development Engineer, working on Team Foundation Server tools before leaving in May 2011.\n\nHartford worked as a Software Engineer at Boeing from May 2011 to January 2012 and then joined Blekko as a Software Engineer, where he worked on software development using Perl and JSON. From 2013 to 2014, he was a Senior Software Development Engineer at SDL plc, followed by roles as a Senior Web Developer at Disney Connected and Advanced Technologies and Lead UI Developer at System of Systems Analytics, Inc. He joined Amazon Web Services as a Senior Software Development Engineer in July 2016, working with AWS technologies and software development tools, before moving to eBay as a Staff Software Engineer in July 2019. At eBay, he worked on the messaging platform team, contributing to full-stack architecture, design, and implementation using technologies including TypeScript, JavaScript, Node, React, Redux, Java, Kotlin, Kafka, Elasticsearch, MySQL, and REST APIs. Hartford returned to Microsoft in September 2021 as a Senior Software Engineer and remained there until January 2023.\n\nIn December 2022, Hartford began working independently on open-source AI and machine learning projects, developing and releasing models including WizardLM Uncensored, WizardVicuna Uncensored, and Alpaca1337. During this period, he also wrote about uncensored models and composable alignment, developed data-collection programs using Python and JavaScript, created the leet10k machine learning dataset, and collaborated with other open-source AI developers on projects including Open-Assistant. He joined Convai as a Senior Applied AI/ML Researcher in October 2023, followed by positions as Senior Applied AI Researcher at Abacus.AI from January to April 2024 and Principal Applied AI Researcher at TensorWave from April to September 2024. In November 2024, he joined Lazarus AI as Chief Scientist, where he works on artificial intelligence research and related technologies. [\\[4\\]](#cite-id-6kbuiuyhht)  [\\[5\\]](#cite-id-qqt6tpprly) \n\n![](https://ipfs.everipedia.org/ipfs/QmYxEAEjETMKmRFcMfjqbyj8Y1vFmfE4ekr1THwRyxLLZQ)\n","categories":[{"id":"people","title":"people"}],"tags":[{"id":"Developer"},{"id":"Researcher"}],"images":[{"id":"QmSjRV1c5DETGCWEJ89sXQzGXEZAb1BJph2d8d2kVNV2Jy","type":"image/jpeg, image/png"}],"media":[{"id":"QmYxEAEjETMKmRFcMfjqbyj8Y1vFmfE4ekr1THwRyxLLZQ","name":"9PecAUItDGcuSEaS.png","source":"IPFS_IMG","thumbnail":"QmYxEAEjETMKmRFcMfjqbyj8Y1vFmfE4ekr1THwRyxLLZQ","caption":""}],"metadata":[{"id":"references","value":"[{\"id\":\"ooivvvwpx6\",\"url\":\"https://www.linkedin.com/in/ehartford/\",\"description\":\"LinkedIn profile About section and current title\",\"timestamp\":1790167405120},{\"id\":\"no9s80t40t\",\"url\":\"https://erichartford.com/\",\"description\":\"Personal website self-description\",\"timestamp\":1790167405120},{\"id\":\"uixiigd82o\",\"url\":\"https://x.com/QuixiAI\",\"description\":\"X profile location and handle\",\"timestamp\":1790167405120},{\"id\":\"6kbuiuyhht\",\"url\":\"https://www.linkedin.com/in/ehartford/details/experience/\",\"description\":\"Career history and open-source AI activity\",\"timestamp\":1790167405120},{\"id\":\"qqt6tpprly\",\"url\":\"https://erichartford.com/dolphin\",\"description\":\"Dolphin announcement and Orca lineage\",\"timestamp\":1790167405120}]"},{"id":"website","value":"https://erichartford.com/"},{"id":"twitter_profile","value":"https://x.com/QuixiAI"},{"id":"linkedin_profile","value":"https://www.linkedin.com/in/ehartford/"},{"id":"github_profile","value":"https://github.com/ehartford"},{"id":"main-image-origin","value":"{\"imageId\":\"QmSjRV1c5DETGCWEJ89sXQzGXEZAb1BJph2d8d2kVNV2Jy\",\"originalId\":\"QmSjRV1c5DETGCWEJ89sXQzGXEZAb1BJph2d8d2kVNV2Jy\"}"},{"id":"commit-message","value":"Create wiki page for Eric Hartford"}],"events":[{"type":"DEFAULT","title":"Joined GitHub","date":"2011-10-01","description":"Created GitHub account","link":"https://github.com/ehartford","multiDateStart":null,"multiDateEnd":null,"id":"f2057d1e-f7ad-433b-a3e9-9c9a878f3f90"},{"type":"DEFAULT","title":"Lead UI Developer at System of Systems Analytics, Inc. 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