Why Open AI Matters

You probably remember when OpenAI became not-so-open. It wasn’t too long ago Google’s Gemini AI showed us African Vikings. Cool, but it never happened, And Africans in Nazi uniforms. Not cool, and never happened. Google’s foray into Large Language Models turned out to be a disaster not unlike Bud Light’s decision to have Dylan Mulvaney as their front man.

And, like me, you’ve lived under 20 plus years of Big Tech censorship and politically correct dominance. As Winston Churchill said, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” — do we really want Big Tech writing our past and future? If the sociocultural aspects of closed AI don’t beg for an open source artificial intelligence future, then maybe, just maybe, there’s another, more interesting reason to go down the open source path?

Fortunately, there is. I recently heard my X friend Jim O’Shaughnessy (and by X, I mean ‘formerly known as Twitter’) articulate what may be the best reason to keep AI open source: Diversity. No, no, no — not that kind of diversity, cognitive diversity. Jim says no matter how well-educated or brilliant we are, we can never make a list of things that never occurred to us. Open source works better because we have such massive cognitive diversity covering the problem. Different minds find things normies working the problem are blind to. We’re blind to our blindness. Jim notes, “…there’s just so many things I don’t know. So it’s very helpful if I find people who do.”

I’ll spare you the Rumsfeldesque “unknown unknowns” speech — you get the idea. Cognitive diversity is the best diversity; in life, and in artificial intelligence. Let’s keep AI open source and forge our own path. Let’s not have Big Tech/Brother write the history of our Golden Age.