“Policy Without Tools Is Just Poetry” - AT Protocol

✨🙌 AI that helps communities thrive on their own terms

Open protocols + AI-enabled coding = building what we need for ourselves

The Arguments Against Open Source AI are Very Bad | Tom Bedor's Blog

The release of Kimi K3 has opened a fresh round of angst and confused discourse. There's a loud cohort of journalists, business leaders, and politicians arguing that open source AI is a dangerous threat. OpenAI's Dean Ball:

A quote from Daniel Stenberg

The challenge with AI in open source security has transitioned from an AI slop tsunami into more of a ... plain security report tsunami. Less slop but lots of reports. …

The Missing Middle of Open Source

Why serious, maintainer-driven projects struggle to sustain themselves—and what it will take to fix it.

How StrongDM’s AI team build serious software without even looking at the code

Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks …

More Than a Tool

What We Learned from a Year of Conversations About AI

AI Safety Is a Narrative Problem · Special Issue 5: Grappling With the Generative AI Revolution

This op-ed explores power and narrative dynamics around AI. Drawing on pop-culture references, the professional experiences of the author and examples from 2023’s “Great AI Safety Hype Roadshow,” this piece draws on the literary criticism technique of practical criticism to consider how speeches and announcements from both Silicon Valley executives and research scientists to interrogate the media-friendly nature of p(doom) discourse—which focuses on the existential risks of AI (PauseAI, 2023)—and its likely consequences. The complexities of AI and its numerous social impacts can be difficult for even the most expert analyst to unpack. In spite of this, the potential of “existential threats” has successfully cut through to become a mainstay of mainstream media coverage over the last year. This piece will make the case that this is an effective narrative conceit that has achieved a number of ends that traditional science communication tends to find difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Firstly, it is easy to understand. Simplification of this nature—that removes jargon and complexity and focuses on a single outcome—is much easier to fit on a TV rolling news ticker or on the cover of a tabloid newspaper than more well-balanced, representative opinions. Secondly, it inherits prior assumptions from well-known dramatic forms. P(doom) plays to stories familiar from Greek tragedy through to Marvel movies, in which lone male heroes battle ineluctable forces. Thirdly, it is imbued with urgency and so becomes difficult to ignore.

Mixture of Experts Explained

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Automate the C-Suite - The Ideas Letter

Weatherby argues that Benanav’s and Morozov’s essays on AI and the left miss a deeper reality: Today’s AI is not a neutral tool operating within capitalism but the materialization of…

I am often wrong

[I shared this note with my team earlier this week, and am posting it here as well. I hope it is interesting or helpful for others working on building product in the age of AI.]

On AI and building your own GIS software

Of the thousands of essays over the past two years surrounding AI and its implications are some very thought provoking ones with enormous implications for GIS. Some of the essays are around the the…

Who Pays for the Commons?

Three and a half years after the emergence of generative AI as a new technology paradigm, there is broad agreement that AI companies have extracted enorm...

Something Big Is Happening

A personal note for non-tech friends and family on what AI is starting to change.

AI, Agency and Protocols_ Power and Governance in Open Social Networks.pdf

Sovereignty Is Not Solitude: Open Source as Canada’s Third Path in AI

True artificial intelligence (AI) sovereignty isn't about building a Canadian fortress; it’s about mastering the open-source ecosystems that power the world.