Our Mission, Deconstructed
Inspire creativity to shape futures that help build communities and advance human capabilities.
Tap a sphere — Chemí, the voice of LabsAI, tells the story behind each element: where the word came from, and how it lives inside the Labs mission. Choose any of Chemí’s 18 voices and your own pace.
Inspire creativity
Encourage humanity to journey through its imagination — boldly, endlessly, untethered.
Shape futures
Embrace unconventional thinking — at all times, under all circumstances — to bring about many exciting futures.
Build communities
Constantly connect and collaborate with other people on the path to progress.
Advance human capabilities
Go the extra mile — delight beyond expectation and move humankind forward through every decision we make, collectively, as a civilization.
Our mission statement is 13 words long and turns on 4 elements. Every product, program and decision across the 7 Frontier Labs is measured against them. Back to Our Mission →
Inspire creativity.
Inspire comes from the Latin inspirare — to breathe into. For the ancients, inspiration was literal: a breath entering a person from somewhere beyond them, filling them with a life they did not have a moment before.
Creativity has an even stranger history. It comes from creare — to bring forth. For most of recorded time, people were only said to make things; bringing something into existence out of nothing was thought to be beyond human reach entirely. It took until the twentieth century for creativity to become a human word at all.
At Labs, we take that breath in, and we hand it back. To inspire creativity is to invite humanity to journey through its own imagination — boldly, endlessly, and untethered. Not to make within the lines, but to bring forth what has never existed.
Shape futures.
Shape is one of the oldest words in English. It comes from scieppan — the same root as the word for a creator — and it meant to form something out of nothing, to give it an outline it did not yet have.
Future comes from the Latin futurus — that which is about to be. It is the part of the verb to be that has not happened yet. Notice that our mission says futures, plural. Not one destiny waiting to be discovered, but many, waiting to be formed.
At Labs, to shape futures is to embrace unconventional ways of thinking — at all times, under all circumstances. Because the future is not something you find. It is something you make. And there are many exciting ones worth making.
Build communities.
Community comes from the Latin communis — com, meaning together, and munus, meaning a gift, and also a duty. A community, at its root, is a group of people bound by what they give one another and by what they owe one another. Shared gifts. Shared obligations.
Build comes from the Old English byldan, from bold — a dwelling. To build was never just to stack materials. It was to make a place where people could live.
At Labs, to build communities is to encourage people to constantly connect and collaborate — to make dwelling places for progress, where the gifts we share and the duties we keep carry all of us forward together.
Advance human capabilities.
Advance comes from the Latin abante — from before. To advance is to move forward from the place where you stood, past the line you had already reached.
Capability comes from capere — to take hold. A capability is, quite literally, what you are able to grasp. And human comes from humus — the earth itself. We are the earthlings: made of soil, and forever reaching upward.
At Labs, to advance human capabilities is to go the extra mile — to delight beyond every expectation, and to move humankind forward through every decision we make. Not one person at a time, but collectively, as a civilization, taking hold of more than we could reach before.