Emad Mostaque on the Intelligent Internet and Universal Basic AI
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What are the three possible future scenarios for AI and why does ownership matter?
Where it was a point whereby If we don't have AI to help us, I think we're in a very bad scenario. With AI, if we don't build it right, we're also in a bad scenario. If AI is built right and is aligned and works with us, then we're in a very good scenario. Who owns that AI that is your best friend? That is your kid's best friend? And how is it constructed? And do we have visibility into that? We're gonna see economic disruption because the labour theory of productivity is about to be challenged. The world becomes a better place, ironically through empathy from AI. And that's infrastructure that should be available to everyone. This is a concept we call universal basic AI.
Hello and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution. Today my guest is Ahmad Mostaq, previously founder and CEO of Stability AI, and now founder of the intelligent internet. I've been following a mod's work since before Stability released Stable Diffusion back in twenty twenty two. And looking back, I think it's fair to say that that release did more than any other, aside from ChatGPT, to kickstart the current AI moment. Certainly when it comes to inspiring researchers and builders all over the world by demonstrating that open source public good AI projects can advance the state of the art across multiple domains, stability was for quite a while in a league of its own. Since then, Stability of the Company has had a famously bumpy road as it's tried to evolve from an open research lab to a sustainable for-profit business.
But Ahmad's ability to articulate a positive vision for humanity's AI future while simultaneously grappling with the unprecedented risks remains to me uniquely compelling. We begin today on the risk side, with Ahmad's stark assessment that humanity faces roughly fifty fifty odds of survival as AI systems become more capable and ubiquitous. Imagining a world in which intelligent robots are everywhere, creating acute risks from misuse, new kinds of hard to model systemic risks, and even the potential for surprising emergent behaviors from the AIs themselves. And also considering how the world's largest companies and most powerful nations are now racing to secure AI-relevant resources and establish strategic advantages.
Perhaps surprisingly, Ahmad doesn't have much hope for traditional regulation or even a pause in AI development. Nevertheless, rather than wallowing in P doom, Ahmad remains in the arena. Today, he argues that we already have AI models powerful enough to dramatically improve most human lives. if we can make them accessible, trustworthy, and aligned with local contexts and values. With that in mind, his new project, the Intelligent Internet, aims to create open, standardized AI infrastructure focused on critical regulated industries like healthcare and education. The vision involves three tiers working together. National or international hypernodes that maintain bodies of common knowledge and perform large scale training runs.
Distributed nodes that perform domain specific fine tuning and provide related services. And finally, personal AI assistants that run locally on consumer devices. By making the entire stack, including the bulk of the training data, open source and transparent, while preserving local control over the models that people use on a daily basis, AMADA aims to create AIs that enhance rather than displace human agency. Of course, training large language models can be expensive, and in general, global public goods often require non-traditional funding mechanisms. So Ahmad is planning to launch a crypto project that will allow and hopefully incentivize people to support the project through a mechanism he's currently calling proof of beneficial compute.
I've personally never been much into crypto, and I'm certainly not giving out any investment advice here, but I find the idea of Universal Basic Intelligence, or UBAI, as Ahmad calls it, so compelling that I do intend to buy a few tokens. Not out of hope for some future financial return, but just because I want to see this project succeed.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are the three possible future scenarios for AI and why does ownership matter?
0:00–8:54
2
How does Emad explain the 50‑50 “P‑doom” risk assessment and its drivers?
8:54–15:44
3
What is “Universal Basic AI” and how could it reshape education, health and everyday life?
15:44–23:10
4
How is the Intelligent Internet architecture structured across hyper‑nodes, distributed nodes and personal assistants?
23:10–1:08:10
5
Why are gold‑standard data sets crucial for safe and transparent AI?
1:08:10–1:22:25
6
How does the Intelligent Internet plan to fund universal basic AI with crypto‑based tokens?
1:22:25–1:37:35
7
What strategies are used to attract and keep top AI talent in a fast‑moving startup?
1:37:35–1:57:17
8
Which regulatory and safety measures are proposed for AI decision‑making systems?
1:57:17–2:05:36
Speakers
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