Why AI is so centralized: How it's built, who controls it, and what comes next

“To the average user, you sort of know that you're interacting with OpenAI, but you don't actually realize how much is going through their servers and their systems. Behind the scenes, there's enormous kind of layers of technology, and, actually, that isn't necessarily the best way to build things as maybe listeners of this will already know. We allowed all of the power to accrue to that small number of companies who built that infrastructure.”

“If we could actually use those devices for some of the tasks that the company would do, like training machine learning models rather than just using them, you could have far more kind of efficiency gains over the world's resources if you built things in that way. So from a purely technological perspective, there's actually a better way of using the world's resources than the current kind of centralized approaches.”

“Crypto allows us to do that entirely programmatically. And so that's very efficient. If it's just humans, it's great. It makes it more efficient. If it's machines, it's essential. Because a machine can't go through the court system. It can't operate through those human world trust mechanisms. It needs programmatic trust mechanisms. And so crypto becomes essential if you start swapping in machines for humans in those interactions.”

“At the end of the day, we're balancing resources like compute power, data, and human effort, and we need to be able to balance all of those. We thought a lot in the AI space about compute power. We haven't thought that much about the human effort one. And I think with reinforcement learning, we minimize that. We allow it to explore and do its learning without the kind of human labeling.”

“We reach a point where the machines are autonomous to be able to make their own decisions. They have their own on chain identities. They have the ability to update their own objective functions and reward models, which in combination with crypto economic property rights basically makes them sovereign economic actors. All this will be coming in the next twelve months.”