In the News

The focus of my work, my desires throughout my entire career has been individual freedom. People often talk in terms of democracy, I can't see how you can have a free society without it being a democratic society, but it's amply evident that you can have a democratic society that is not a free society. And a lot of this has to do with the distribution of capability, productive power, decision-making, et cetera. And so my large interest is in decentralisation. Now, looking very broadly, look to biology, I'm very encouraged because the basic manufacturing process in biology is protein synthesis and occurs in every individual cell. On the other hand, if I look at the universe as a whole, I'm not so encouraged because the manufacture of heavy elements takes expensive objects Like supernovae and colliding neutron stars and it's very centralized. But looking to human constructs, the same issues apply if not the same grandiosity. We had as great a tool maybe as has ever occurred in human history, born approximately 35 years ago with the World Wide Web, the single biggest application running on the internet. And I believe that artificial intelligence, generative artificial intelligence, is the most powerful tool to have been developed since then. Now, I want to quote again from that UN report that was cited a few minutes ago because it was quoted by the Center for the AI and Digital Policy. It said, the UN warns of growing AI inequality as the market approaches 4.8 trillion With just 100 companies controlling 40% of R&D investment. The White House has issued federal AI guidance requiring chief AI officers, et cetera. And it's that first point, 100 companies controlling nearly half of the investment. And I think we are looking at a danger of having a small number of companies, and very frequently these things contract by mergers and goings out of business and so forth, might be many fewer than that, controlling artificial intelligence. Which means, roughly speaking, they will have to control the policy over what artificial intelligence is willing to do for customers. It would be much better If artificial intelligence is widely distributed, is accessible in all of its manifestations to many, many millions of people, and so I think this discovery that AI can be done using ubiquitous CPUs rather than the rarer and inherently more expensive GPUs, It is the best, one of the most exciting things I have seen in quite a number of years. So I salute this work and I hope to see it bloom.”