On a cold winter afternoon in Switzerland on Thursday, January 11 2024, at CFC St Moritz, blockchain leaders, including Erik Voorhees, the founder of Shapeshift, gathered for their annual gathering. During the event, Voorhees had a casual fireside chat with tech veteran Dr Bill Tai, about blockchain and the soup du jour, AI.
Voorhees is working on an open-source permissionless blockchain AI project called Morpheus and explains: I got interested in AI as I think it’s important that people can access open-source permissionless AI.
He goes on to say “this is a very controversial statement” as most people thing regulation is the solution.
Voorhees see AI speeding towards many of the same issues that cryptocurrency faced.
AI, he said, will be an incredibly powerful technology that will be co-opted by centralised intermediaries and or the governments that oversee them, unless alternatives exist.
Voorhees explained that BitcoinBTC was that first alternative where you could have permissionless finance without any intermediary. He explains, money is extremely powerful and its therefore very important that no single authority in the world has all power over all the money, that would be very dystopian.
Voorhees says the same is true with AI as it is is “incredibly powerful”. And if the vast majority of power over AI comes down to several tech companies and the government that oversees them, that can get very dystopian, he explains.
Fast forward a few weeks and Voorhees concerns appear to be unfolding anew each day.
Today, Elon Musk initiated legal action against OpenAI and Sam Altman, the creators of ChatGPT, alleging a violation of the principles established when Musk co-founded the organization in 2015. The lawsuit asserts that OpenAI has strayed from its initial commitment to non-profit and open-source objectives.
Musk is seeking to compel OpenAI to adhere to it’s Founding Agreement and return to its mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the individual Defendants and the largest technology company in the world,” the lawsuit says.
This is not the first fight Musk has picked with centralised AI.
Last week Must took aim at Google’sGOOG AI project, Gemini for being sexist and racist after it made images of the Pope as a woman and Vikings as African American.
After many subsequent posts on the topic, he then shared that a senior Google executive had called to say they were going to fix the racial and gender bias on Gemini. “Time will tell” he commented:
On an apparent role, earlier this week Musk posted on X that he had bought a Microsoft computer and in setting it up, it was trying to force him to create a Microsoft account which also meant giving their AI access to his computer. He commented “this is messed up” and “this is not cool of Microsoft”.
Open source permissionless AI – what actually is it?
Voorhees explains what open source permissionless AI is: “instead of closed-source LLM (large language models are the data sets used in AI) you use open-source LLMs, of which there are many. You allow people to access those LLMs through decentralised channels. The compute provider doing the processing of the answer doesn’t come from a centralised company but from one of many different nodes on the network.
So when you have an open source LLM and a decentralised set of providers of the compute you have a permissionless, non centralised alternative to ChatGPT. And according to Voorhees, the time to build those is now.
“Those of us who believe that Information is power, just as money is power, equally believe that it can be dangerous. And because it’s dangerous, you need to avoid centralizing that power in a single focal point. With this in mind, the impetus to have decentralized AI is huge”.
Perhaps after the goings on of the last weeks, Voorhees view that ‘humanity needs open source alternatives’ isn’t as controversial a statement as he thought. Time, in the not too distant future, will tell.
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