Aurora Labs

Aurora Labs is a four-person Reykjavik research outfit operating from a converted geothermal-power-station outbuilding twenty kilometers outside the city — chosen, the founder will explain at length, because Iceland’s green electricity is the cheapest carbon-clean compute on the planet and the firm’s research is the kind that requires running a great many epochs. Their cooling problem solves itself, given Icelandic weather. Their heating problem is also solved, given Icelandic geothermal.

The work is exploratory: small-scale models trained on unconventional corpora, published occasionally as preprints under aliases that fool no one in the field. The firm sells the side products — domain-tuned models that emerge from research as byproducts — to whoever wants them. Each delivered model clears in the low five-figure Cu range, research-grade pricing that the buyers consider underpriced and the firm considers fair. The buyers tend to be other research outfits and the occasional curious corporate.

The founder’s official professional profile lists her job title as “compute janitor.” Her actual role is principal investigator. Her actual job is keeping the four-person team from going feral over a Reykjavik winter.

Aurora Labs publishes roughly twelve preprints per year under five different author aliases. Three of those aliases are real people. The other two are not. The founder maintains this is a methodological choice about reviewer bias. It also has the side effect of making the firm’s actual output volume difficult to estimate from the outside.