Founded December 19, 2022
About
A youth-led AI nonprofit, run by students, backed by Hack Club, and governed by documents you can read on this site.
Why we exist
Talent is everywhere. Compute is not.
Plenty of teenagers could do serious AI work. Almost none of them can finish a training run on a school laptop, and almost none have a researcher who will read their code and say what is wrong with it.
LinkScape supplies both. Members get an 80-GPU cluster, a problem worth a month of their time, and review from people a few years ahead of them. The work that comes out goes to peer review and onto GitHub under an open licence.
11 of us run this, split between universities and high schools. We are the people doing the work and the people it aims to reach, which keeps the programs honest about what actually helps.
Every figure on this site comes from a record we can produce. We state our research at the stage it has reached, and we publish the misses alongside the wins.
Three pillars
Build in the open, train the next people, keep the room going.
Building Impact
We ship open AI research and tools.
Papers, models, datasets, and software, released publicly by default. Anyone can read the work, run it, and build on it.
Developing Talent
Students get compute, problems, and mentors.
Members train models on our cluster, enter competitions, and co-author research that goes to peer review.
Fostering Community
We run the hackathons and workshops.
Weekend events and open repositories where students meet people building the same things, then keep building together afterwards.
5 commitments
Five commitments, not five adjectives
Each one commits us to a specific behaviour. They exist to settle arguments.
Responsible Innovation
We assess harm before we build.
Every AI system gets an impact assessment before deployment. We document risks and limitations in the open, and we choose the useful application over the impressive one.
Transparency
We work in public.
Open source is the default. Decisions ship with the reasoning behind them, mistakes get corrected publicly, and our policies are on this site for anyone to read.
Accessibility
Anyone can start here.
Membership is open worldwide. We support contributors at every skill level and design for people who have never trained a model.
Impact
We report what changed.
Every program states the outcome it aims for before it runs. We publish a figure once the record behind it is verified, and we say plainly when we miss a target.
Safety
Some of our members are minors.
Testing and review precede every release. Anyone can raise a concern directly with the CFO, who owns safety escalation, and we accept limits on capability when safety is unclear.
6 entries · December 19, 2022 to now
How we got here
- December 2022
LinkScape is founded
Thomas Wu starts the organization around a simple premise: students should be building real things, in the open, together.
- 2023
The first public repositories
The earliest work goes up on GitHub, including the first version of this site. The habit of releasing by default takes hold well before any policy tells us to.
- March 2025
SH Hacks
A weekend hackathon for middle and high school students in Shanghai, run alongside AdventureX and Spark Lab.
- 2025
LinkDown and Ollmao
Two pieces of software people outside the organization actually use, one for saving video and one for running AI models locally on a Mac.
- February 2026
The first governance documents
Mission, vision and values, the fiscal sponsorship summary, and the first leadership roster. The organization starts writing down how it intends to behave.
- July 2026
A CTO, and the full pack
Zigao Wang is appointed CTO and takes ownership of the H100 fleet and platform security. The documentation reaches seventy-seven deliverables spanning governance, finance, ethics, security, people, and impact.
How LinkScape is legally constituted
The exact arrangement, in plain terms.
LinkScape operates as a fiscally sponsored project of The Hack Foundation, doing business as Hack Club, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Hack Club holds the charitable status. Every donation, grant, and expense moves through Hack Club Bank.
For a donor this is straightforward: your gift is tax-deductible and Hack Club issues the receipt. For us it means their approval process governs our spending and their auditors review our books, and our time goes into programs instead of corporate paperwork.
LinkScape itself is a program, not a separately incorporated charity. We say so plainly wherever the distinction matters.
Charitable status held by
Hack Club, 501(c)(3)
Receipts issued by
Hack Club Bank
Audited by
Hack Club, alongside its other programs
LinkScape's legal form
A sponsored program