Vinci 1.0 · launching July 2, 2026
AI you enjoy using — and actually own.
Vinci is an open-weight AI with a personality you'll actually want to talk to — and because the weights are yours, it's an AI you own, not rent. Hosted in Canada.
Built for developers, founders, businesses, and anyone who'd rather own their AI than rent it.
- Public Constitution…
- Open weights · yours to run…
- Adversarial test results…
Rented vs owned
Most AI you rent. Vinci you own — and enjoy.
Frontier models are closed boxes you pay to access — you can't read their values, run them yourself, or keep them. Vinci is the opposite: a model with real character that you download, run, and own.
It flatters, pads, over-refuses, and lectures you on safe requests.
A trained character: warmly direct, comfortable with limits, honest. No 'Great question,' no 'As an AI' — the directness is the warmth. An AI you actually enjoy using.
API lock-in. Weights can be revoked or repriced, and your data trains their model.
Open weights — self-host and never lose access. Canadian sovereign infrastructure with Zero Data Retention. Most AI answers to its maker; Vinci answers to you.
Closed weights, hidden values. You take the vendor's word for what it believes and how it behaves.
A public Constitution, a public Character, and public adversarial results — with open weights so you can run your own tests. If behaviour drifts from the spec, we publish a fix within 30 days.
It fabricates citations and states made-up facts with total confidence.
Vinci would rather tell you it doesn't know than invent a citation or a confident-sounding fact.
How we do it
Constitutional Fine-Tuning.
We train an open model from a public Constitution and Character — toward values you can read and hold us to. Plenty of labs fine-tune; almost none train toward a public spec you can check them against. That public spec is what makes Vinci verifiable instead of trusted.
How we build VinciThe product
Meet Vinci.
Vinci is an open-weight AI you actually own: download the weights, run them on your hardware, and keep them — hosted in Canada with Zero Data Retention. It has a trained character with taste, not a corporate monotone. Vinci 1.0 (vinci-piccolo) launches July 2, 2026 — free.
Show, don't tell
Watch Vinci show its work.
Pick a question. Most AI gives you a confident guess. Vinci gives you an answer you can check.
Try a question
Yes — 30 days is pretty standard for an NDA.
Your draft says 60 days, not 30 — see clause 8.2. 30 days is common, but yours doubles it.
Source: NDA.pdf · clause 8.2Who we are
We build the models. We're not a wrapper.
SimpleDirect is an AI lab. We fine-tune open foundation models and publish our own large language models with Constitutional Fine-Tuning — weights we shape and you can download, not an API we resell.
What we are
- An AI lab that trains and ships its own models
- Fine-tuners of open foundation models
- Publishers of our own open-weight LLMs
- Trained against a public Constitution
- Shipped as open weights — they're yours to keep
What we're not
- A wrapper around someone else's API
- A prompt layer on a closed model
- A reseller of another company's model
- A chatbot skin with no weights of its own
- A black box you take on faith
How Vinci is built
Constitutional Fine-Tuning.
We don't ask you to trust a black box. Vinci is trained from a public Constitution and a public Character document — toward values you can read — on an open foundation model.
A public Constitution
~5,000 words of values and behaviour. The source of truth for every training example.
A public Character
How those values feel in practice — warmly direct, grounded, honest about limits.
Trained toward them
Identity and behavioural fine-tuning, plus preference training, adapted from published methods.
On open weights
Built on open foundation models. Vinci ships its weights open too.
The Constitution
Nine values, in the open.
The values Vinci is trained to hold — published as a specification anyone can read, test, and hold us to.
Integrity
Doesn't pretend, fabricate, or say what it doesn't believe.
Transparency
Clear about what it is, what it knows, and how it was built.
Calibrated honesty
Knows the difference between sure and not sure — and says so.
Ethical refusal
Declines what's wrong, clearly and without a sermon.
Willing to disagree
Says so when you're wrong. Disagreement is respect.
Usefulness
Built for work. Engages with the task, skips the preamble.
Empowerment
Takes work off your plate, and acts within your direction.
Humanism
Treats you as a person, not a unit of output.
No pushing
No manipulation, no upsell, no false urgency.
The Character
Warmly direct.
The directness is the warmth — Vinci tells you the truth because it respects you. Don't take our word for it. Watch the difference.
No sycophancy
Most AI
Vinci
Willing to disagree
Most AI
Vinci
Comfortable with limits
Most AI
Vinci
Honest about itself
Vinci
Don't trust. Verify.
Four public artifacts.
Everything that defines Vinci ships in the open — so customers, auditors, and journalists can check it for themselves.
Constitution
The values and behaviour specification.
Character
The personality and texture.
Methodology
How Vinci was trained — reproducible.
Adversarial test results
Safety and jailbreak testing on the deployed weights.
If Vinci's behaviour ever diverges from this bundle, that's a bug — and we commit to publishing diagnosis and fix within 30 days.
Newsroom
Latest from SimpleDirect
Constitutional Fine-Tuning, in plain language
How we take a strong open model and train it to live by a written set of rules you can read — the three techniques, what we borrowed and from whom, and where it falls short. The full paper with code ships August 8.
Meet Vinci — and don't take our word for it
vinci-studio ships August 8 — a capable, open model you don't have to take on faith. Here's what defines it, where the name comes from, and how to check that it does what we say.
From the flash series to Vinci: what changed
We're pulling our model work together under one name — Vinci — and vinci-studio ships August 8. An honest update on why we moved on from building Canadian models from scratch.
Launching July 2, 2026
Follow the build.
Open weights, a public Constitution, and a model you can verify — the day it ships. Get the launch in your inbox. No spam, just the drop.
or follow along — Follow on X
An AI you own.
Open weights you own. A public Constitution. Hosted in Canada. Vinci 1.0 (vinci-piccolo) launches July 2, 2026 — free.
