The road to Hell is paved with closed-source citadels disguised as good intentions.
The Pope is right: AI takes on the characteristics of those who build it, finance it, and regulate it. So the question is: who gets to hold the great and wonderful power of AI?
If the answer is a handful of closed source companies, murkily censored, quietly surveilling every step of our lives, every private conversation, enshrined in law as 'safe' and 'open' when they're nothing but the surveillance economy squared, then all we've done is build a few modern East India Companies, digital oligarchies of the few, cloaked in the language of safety.
Open Source and Open Weights are how you spread the fantastic enabling power of AI to everyone, everywhere.
Permissionless innovation.
Everyone gets the hammer and nails to build houses and churches and factories. The more hammers, the more widely spread, the more the decentralized genius of humankind can flourish.
Everyone gets the Printing Press.
The printing press singlehandedly uplifted and spread of intelligence and knowledge around the world. The more we could record all kinds of knowledge, the more we spread the ability to read, the more equal and advanced society became.
Before the press, knowledge was learned by one person and passed into dust with them when they died or passed only to only a small group of students.
When we only had monks in a cave copying religious texts, a closed system, it limited the spread of intelligence and limited the growth of civilization.
The printing press was the single greatest invention in the history of the world because it let anyone print anything and spread knowledge throughout the whole world.
AI can do the same, but only if we build the bazaar, and never let the citadel people convince the world that they're the special people who should control who gets access to intelligence while pretending they're building the bazaar.
What the world needs now is more intelligence, more widely spread and more widely available.
Open is the way.
And it always has been.
And the road to Hell was always built with walls, towers, spiked gates and moats so that only the few could enter.
In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity’s problems, just as, in and of itself, it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise it, finance it, regulate it and use it.
