Announcing Zirconoid

Zirconoid provides specialized datasets that power frontier models. We are the upstream partner for the data companies that supply the world's leading AI labs: we recruit the people who do real work, we partner with the places where that work happens, and we capture what they do.

Our core belief is that data complex enough to teach today's frontier models is bottlenecked by access to real operators and the datasets they produce. Engineering systems that solve technical problems get commoditized. Fresh human-collected and operator-collected data does not, because it is so specific to the person, the place, and the task.

That is why we built a talent engine rather than a software platform. We bring people in by the hour for capture scenarios, or on contract and full time, across any industry where people still outperform models.

Hiring one operator at a time only goes so far. The work that matters happens inside buildings other people own, so we partner with the sites as well as the staff: boutique workshops with four benches, contract factories, full manufacturing plants, bottling and packaging lines, chip fabs and their cleanrooms, foundries, machine shops, textile mills, food and cold-chain processing, warehouses and logistics hubs, ports, rail yards and shipyards, refineries, and the specialized plants that make one part for one customer. We go to the regions where each industry sits, agree terms with plant management, and run capture around the production schedule rather than across it.

The mix is not only a matter of logistics. A four-person workshop and a thousand-person plant teach a model different things about the same task, and a dataset drawn from one kind of site alone inherits that site's habits.

Our first programs are running now: egocentric video from textile and electronics manufacturing, and structured diagnostic reasoning from oncologists. If you supply data to frontier labs and need operators, or a site, you cannot source yourself, write to [email protected].