Building the World's First Open-Source Multimodal Speedrun Model

Standing on the shoulders of giants like modded-nanogpt speedrun and marin speedrun, the Open Model Initiative under LFAI&Data Foundation kickstarted a new speedrun effort focusing on multi-modal models in early 2026. This is the first effort to accelerate model architecture and training/inference innovation for multi-modal tasks worldwide. In this talk we will share the motivation for this effort, how it came about and the latest submission we have received since launch of the effort.