Vinci 1.0 · launching June 30, 2026
Most AI is built to never matter. Vinci™ is the opposite. And it's yours to keep.
Vinci talks to you like a friend with a stake in what you decide. Warm, honest, with a point of view. Open weights, hosted in Canada, free to start.
Built for developers, founders, businesses, and anyone who'd rather own their AI than rent it.
- Warm, honest, a real point of view…
- Open weights, yours to run…
- Says 'I'm not sure' over faking it…
What Vinci is
Not another assistant. Something that's actually in it with you.
Most AI answers like it has nothing at stake — sanded down to never offend and never matter. Vinci is the opposite. It cares what you're trying to do, it holds a point of view, and it'll tell you the truth even when it's not what you wanted. We didn't build it to win benchmarks. We built it because the world has enough tools that don't care, and almost no one is making one that does.
The character, shown
It cares enough to tell you the truth.
piccolo is a small model — 4 billion parameters, free, and sometimes wrong on facts. When it isn't sure, it says so instead of making something up. That's the stake it takes: it would rather tell you the truth than tell you what you want to hear. Watch the difference.
Sincere, not servile
Most AI
Vinci
Won't fake certainty
Most AI
Vinci
Won't pretend to know you
Most AI
Vinci
Honest about itself
Vinci
Cares within its limits
Most AI
Vinci
What it cares about
Nine things it actually cares about.
Not a marketing list — the values Vinci is trained to hold, and the reason it talks to you the way it does. Published in full, if you ever want to check.
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.
Rented vs owned
Most AI you rent. Vinci you own — and it's on your side.
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 company
We're building AI you can own.
SimpleDirect® is a small team building Vinci™ — open-weight AI with character, hosted on Canadian sovereign infrastructure. We don't take VC. We don't lock our models behind a closed door. The AI you can actually rely on is the one you own and can run yourself — and it should be one you enjoy talking to. That's the whole company.
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
We show our work
And if you want to check, it's all public.
We're not asking you to take any of this on faith. The Constitution Vinci is trained toward, and the tests we run on it, are public. Not a pitch — just there if you want it.
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 June 30, 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
Try it. It's free, and it's yours.
Talk to piccolo in your browser, or download the weights and run it on your own machine. No signup wall, no usage limits. Vinci 1.0 (vinci-piccolo) launches June 30, 2026.
