Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter (now X), recently talked about the power of open source.
Talking about the closed source nature of social media where the algorithms greatly control what we see, Dorsey said that we are being programmed by black box algorithms that are impacting our free will and the agency we have.
He further added that the only answer to this is to open source the choice of algorithms, i.e. giving people the choice of what algorithm they want to use from a client that they trust and to even build their own algorithm that they can plug in on top of these networks.
Ironically, even Elon Musk agrees!
“I think open source always wins. I think the public will always win,” he replied when asked about his views on whether the open-source development model of AI will win or it will largely be a regulated activity in the future.
He further added that the same thing that happened to the internet is happening to AI, emphasising that AI was something that was based on sharing information, sharing research, sharing science and being completely open but “now is being closed into five companies,” indirectly hinting at Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, and Apple.
“These five companies are building tools that we all will become entirely dependent upon, and because they’re so complicated, we have no idea how to verify the correctness, how they work, and what they’re actually doing,” he added, emphasising the importance of having an open-source alternative to these closed companies.
Dorsey said, “With open source, we have millions of people around the world that can actually build these systems instead of being dependent upon a Sam Altman or Elon Musk,” highlighting that it’s the decisions of people at the top that guide these tools and become the underlying fundamentals for all the experiences that people have on the internet and more and more off the internet as well.
“These systems are controlling every single aspect of our life. Every single day, someone will encounter some sort of intelligence that is interacting with them or dictating what they do or what they don’t do with their day and that’s really scary when you realize that only five companies are building these tools and they’re building them in a very closed way,” he added.
He finally appreciated the open-source AI movement, calling it “very deliberate”.
Yann LeCun has also always been a strong proponent for open-source AI.
“Eventually, all our interactions with the digital world will be mediated by AI assistants. This means that AI assistants will constitute a repository of all human knowledge and culture; they will constitute a shared infrastructure like the internet is today,” he said in his talk at GenAI Winter School recently, urging platforms to be open-source.
He further added that we cannot have a small number of AI assistants controlling the entire digital diet of every citizen across the world, taking a dig at OpenAI and a few other companies without naming them.
