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The Foundry Project#

The documents survived. The voices didn't.

Fine-tuned LLMs to preserve and reanimate the rhetorical voices of America's founders for civic education and constitutional discourse.


About#

The Foundry uses Constitutional AI and ORPO fine-tuning to capture the distinctive voices, reasoning patterns, and philosophical positions of key US Founding Fathers — starting with James Madison. Our production model (ORPO R2 on Qwen 3-32B) scores 8.97/10 on a 36-prompt behavioral evaluation harness.

Key Documents#

The Madison Constitution#

5,000-word first-person character document synthesized from 468,000 words of primary sources and 1.8 million words of scholarly biography. The richest character constitution ever used for LLM fine-tuning.

Research Paper#

Full methodology and findings: knowledge-voice decoupling, LoRA quantization fragility, the structural incompatibility between ORPO and subsequent SFT stages — a finding that directly affects anyone designing multi-stage character training pipelines — learning rate sensitivity, and source-enriched data generation.

Training Results#

Comprehensive record of every training run from DPO v1 through ORPO R2 with per-run configs, category scores, and detailed analysis.

Scoring Methodology#

How we evaluate models: 5 weighted dimensions, LLM judge with constitutional rubric, weighted average override, and JSON parse repair.

Current Status#

Model Score Dataset Date
Qwen 3-32B R2 (production) 8.97 1,498 pairs 2026-03-31
Qwen 3-32B v1 8.81 1,273 pairs 2026-03-29
Gemma 3 27B v4 8.52 1,273 pairs 2026-03-28
Gemma 3 27B v3b 3.41 475 pairs 2026-03-26

Score: 36-prompt LLM judge evaluation (Sonnet 4.6), 1–10 scale, weighted average of 5 dimensions. See Scoring Methodology.

Source Code#

View on GitHub