Should AI Be Open-Sourced? The Debate That Will Shape Everything w/ Mark Surman | EP #136

29:31So we'll take the bet and oh my god, that's incredible. Well, probably that maybe five or 10 years before, not the day before, it takes up an annual. Yeah, I'm being mean. I'm being mean, Jeff. But I think your point is right. One of the things I want to pull in, and it goes back to the question I didn't answer earlier, but also on this, like companies are going to want to grow in this way, is there also There's a question of disruption to what end, right? So some people will come in and disrupt because they've got a great idea that they want to build a company. And capitalism and companies are great at solving certain problems and creating public good and even public goods, you know, things that are shared in common, contributing to Linux, all that stuff.

30:12But there also are things to your question of like not starting a nonprofit. The companies are just never gonna be good at. And so that's where when we talk about public AI as a counterpoint, I don't think that a company is ever going to be good at what has happened with Linux, which is a collective public good that all the companies who build on it and researchers and everybody governments build on top of. And for all it's a pain in the ass of Linux foundation struggles who's getting enough members, that is a form of social organization that lends itself to being an independent third party. Unless you want to give it a government altogether, that's another form of social innovation that has its purpose.

30:59I would call myself a libertarian capitalist, so that's right, it's been towards. I'm an old punk anarchist, and sometimes we'll have some calling cause there. But I think that the thing is, you know, what social forms or social organizations are helpful to what innovation and accelerating what innovation. So, you know, do you, are we happy that in addition to NBC, ABC, CBS, we also had PBS in the broadcast era. I think it took on a role that the commercial players were never going to take on. And so to me, the question at any point, including the... But innovation comes in and YouTube comes online.

31:42Great. And then we don't need PBS or DBC or CBC. And so when we have a government formed provider, right, I would rather have complete and total open access for anybody to provide whatever they want. But that comes later in the process. And I think the question to always be asking is, what's not gonna happen if you just leave it to the market. I think that's a very fair and a very important question for humanity's benefit. Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love.

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34:33It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. Alright, let's go back to our episode. So I want to jump into your public AI, making AI work for everyone. And I pulled out five points and I'd love to dive into them a little bit. But I think that entrepreneurs listening to our conversation here, there are a few different debates going on in the AI world. One is we'll digital superintelligence destroy humanity. That's a great debate. Not going to have that conversation right now. We'll let Paul hold the jobs. We can have it out. I'm happy to have it. I want to thank over and out.

35:13We'll let Paul hold our jobs. Will they help us create longevity and fusion? The answer is yes, but we'll look it back to that later. But the question of how do we assure safety and transparency and who's responsible for that? I mean, these are fundamental questions. So here's the first point I've written down, and let's discuss what this means. So AI development is dominated by commercial interests. Why is that a bad thing or is that a good thing? Well, I think that commercial interests are a part of driving the innovation is a great thing and You know you often have these dances thinking about the internet overall which mean You know non -commercial research like deep Innovations or whether that's DARPA and the internet or CERN and the web They then you know you actually figure what to do with it and there's a lot of commercial drivers of innovation from there.

36:17And then, you know, off and off the words, there's a role for what is a commercial player not doing where, you know, you take Firefox or Wikipedia or Linux as examples where the nonprofit players come and play a really hugely social socially and economically beneficial role. So, fast forward to today in terms of AI, I think it's great the amount of commercial innovation that is happening. Commercial dominance is a different thing than commercial innovation. And so, it's where what we see and want to accelerate is that there are also, it is a public option that complements it. Not, you know, just said a kind of motherhood in Apple Pie, but because it is really important and then doing the things you're talking about before, what won't the market do on its own?

37:04And so some of the things the market won't do on its own is I don't think it'll pay attention to safety in a way that is actually broad enough for us to be safe. I think people trying to corner the market on safety is actually a dangerous, I mean, you might get some good stuff out of it, right? But if we actually want to protect humanity, the idea that there's one or two vendors or 10 vendors, like, cornering the market on safety is a dangerous game for humanity. Having an open where a lot of different players can pitch in on safety, see how stuff works under the hood, I don't think the market is going to drive that on its own.

37:43But isn't that good? I agree with you it's a key piece but isn't that the role of the government versus open source or any particular company, you know, when I think about why governments should exist and not, and where are they not overreaching, and this is a delicate balance, safety for the population it represents for me, whether it's safety from armed forces or police or regulation is like the most fundamental thing I think a government should provide. Do you agree with that? Absolutely, and we haven't figured out, although I think we're actually zooming towards it, if the American political system worked at all, it would be easier.

38:36Having that regulation is the role of government. What are the guardrails? So you know, we take something like the evolution of transportation and happy there are traffic laws and safety laws and that is the proper rule of government and building cars is the proper rule of the private sector. Public transportation is a thing you know that kind of sits in between. So I agree providing safety, absolutely you know regulating the guard rails on safety, absolutely in all of the government. But jump to AI, one of the critical things I believe and we believe in those regulations working is transparency and the ability for people to collectively tackle the safety problems in order to comply with those regulations.

39:22And so the whole history of open science and everybody looking together to drive AI forward, you know, with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow in that old open source principle. to me, that's actually the more likely going to produce an outcome that lines up with that regulation. It's not a government's job to do the implementation. On the flip side, on the flip side having a few people try to corner the market in compliance with those regulations and what safety is and lock it all down, some of those could be useful players, but I don't think that's enough to keep us safe. My bent again is towards entrepreneurs to solve problems.

40:03I think about, you mentioned transportation, I think about the, you know, in the space industry, which is my earlier part of my life, you know, it was Lockheed and Boeing, sort of the large defense contractors that were launching humanity into space. And here comes, you know, and they were dominant by, by far, right? and the government is building the space shuttle under contractors. And then here comes Elon as a disruptor and captures 99 percent of the market. Right? And the other companies will go, the only reason the companies are exist is the government likes having a second supplier in place.

40:43But we'll see, we'll see relativity space and, and Bezos with Blu -Origin come in and those will become the second suppliers. But I don't think you could have ever gone to the level of innovation and brilliance in a governmental program or a government driven program. It was like just getting the very best people on the planet and forcing them or focusing them to take huge risks in innovation. So the question is, can you get that speed and energy in open source or is it some segments of open source and not others? Well, I think open source and governments are different. So I think the role of governments is you have to create guardrails or to fund public goods.

41:35And so, you know, somebody who is thinking about DARPA, finding public goods, I mean, you got a lot of innovation and to some degree speed, or there's a long game out of the government's playing that funding public goods role. You can get that in open source. I do think the role of of the source often is after some of the high speed entrepreneurial innovation happens. So you see Linux tons like 10 years, a half a generation after Solarrus or Windows NT and it's like we want a different thing, we want to collectivize this and make an infrastructure. Firefox comes 10 years after Netscape. We keep eating it comes 10 years after in Card -Tank but it's just a high one of those CD -ROMs you know you get a prize.

42:18But I think the role of open source is actually to create often the more valuable public good version of what has been driven by commercial innovation. So on this first point of AI development is dominated by commercial interests. So that is a truth and is continuing should that be dissuaded, should that be, you know, So the answer is so what and what do we do about it is the question. Yeah, and the so what is and you won't get to the public goods you need in terms of keeping the market open for smaller players in terms of researches and terms of safety. I think you need open source and truly open source that operates in a kind of way that we all have access to and doesn't get kind of off it.

43:08But if the open source, if the open source is wide, yeah, please. So I think in the so what and how if you would and how that should go. So the wise things like maybe I already talked about them. We have the link of box for this era. We've got the ability to have transparency for safety. How, you know, maybe corporate players actually even drive that and I think them corporate players are going to two by two major, X they have, which is like open closed private, you know, commercial public. And you see different people, you kind of down in the commercial but open, you have met up trying to play.

43:46I think that's good. In the long run, I also want to make sure there's stuff that is kind of owned in common. So you have people like the Allen Institute, which was set up by Paul Hall before he died. I'll need to pray. I - Which he made the money to fund that from a monocholistic executive. Yeah. You have a tax system that supports from have to be in America. So that's what is supposed to happen. So, you know, he really believed in open air, he really believed in open source AI, and you have an amazing high -altrow -body leading that. I think that could become the Linux or the Linux foundation of this era.

44:28And so, you know, both of those are useful players to kind of have out there. I do think one of the critical things that we're missing right now is in every Western in country, you're seeing huge amounts of money being thrown at compute or huge kind of looking at how we're going to deal with energy and AI. And to me, we really should make sure that those government dollars go to public goods. So if I'm giving you huge amounts of compute as a researcher or even a company, that should produce open source out the other end of the process. If public dollars pay for it, public goods should come out of the other end.

45:05Yeah, I mean, my most talk is made a, you know, a statement which I really liked, which is this is infrastructure. This is fundamental, the compute is fundamental infrastructure for every country. And every country should own its own models and its own infrastructure. I mean, it's going to become oxygen electricity for information. I think it's, I agree with them 100 % that it's infrastructure and it's not just the the computer. It's the model, it's the whole stack. We did a big paper on that with a bunch of other people, including Yanlecun, was a part of it at an event last year or earlier this year.

45:44And one of the things I would be really careful of is not to think that it's national sovereignty, but actually, you know, I think the democracies of the world building the system that is open to control by them. And you're going to have the Spanish language love. You can have the Spanish, large language model or the Italian or the French or whatever on top of a shared pool of infrastructure which is effectively AI built that is open source and foreign democracy. But I actually think that that infrastructure is something that, as a set of countries in the world that have a certain set of values, we want that collectively that we can all be known.

46:24Where do you come out in the discussion like we need to go as rapidly as we can because we're in a fundamental race with China? And that fast as we can is going to be, you know, government and investors pumping money into for -profit companies that have employed the smartest people on the planet. And this is a race for the, for, you know, principles of freedom. So, I agree we got to go as fast as we can to build a technological society, including an AI stack that is driven by freedom and pluralism and values that I hold dear. And I think private companies are a part of it. I also think public AI is central to it.

47:07I mean, we talk about public orientation, public use, public goods. And that public orientation is, you know, how do you put the intent of pluralism and democracy into the design of these products and test against it over time, which is about safety, which is about who gets to contribute all those things. There's a great book, or I mean, it gets only a digital book, which maybe that's all that matters right now, by Audrey Tang, who was the digital minister for Taiwan, talking about you actually can build. I mean, they basically have people who are very focused on private wealth and China, which is very focused on a particular totalitarian approach, shaping AI in their own image.

47:52What we don't have is a high -speed fast approach to how do we build democratic pluralistic AI? I'm kind of going to buy into that. Yes, go fast and go fast not just to back somebody owning the market in the West, but go fast for something that is a set of players building something that supports democracy and pluralism. and you make money off of it. Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called one skin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a synthetic that kills senile cells in your skin.

48:35And this literally reverses the age of your skin and I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. Alright, let's get back to the episode. I mean, there is a scenario where companies and the best meritocracies are tracking the very best people with the most capital, the most compute, are building the best systems, and then the government becomes a user of those systems to support its people. In the same way that NASA didn't build starship, you know, kudos to Elon for Flight 5, but it's going to become when the largest users of starship.

49:22So can we deliver on the public good with private, private models and private companies? Yes, and I think there's always going to be stuff that private companies don't do. And there are a front -end companies who play totally in a black box, like company I, and private companies that play in a way that, for their own interest, also benefits the public good and creates public goods, like Meta is with Lama. And so I think there's a, you have to take a new one's view on how do you get to that stuff. And our view is you want both commercial and government and nonprofit and open source community players all pushing towards this kind of pluralistic open and public AI option.

50:16Alongside everything else, not too exclusive. Alongside everything else, it's not exclusive. I get it and I agree. And as long as, you know, again, the government is not mandating, but it's enabling the emergence of those resources, of those open source teams and perspectives and so forth. I mean, that makes complete sense. And can I ask another question? Because I think privacy is one of the main, is it a big driver for Mozilla, yes? Absolutely. Do you believe we actually have privacy? Oh, it's not a tricky question. So privacy is a core. And it's something like an individual's privacy and security is sacrosanct.

51:10It doesn't quite say sacrosanct, but is the end of the manifesto. It's one of the core. I know. And we struggle with what is privacy now, because for us, privacy was make a browser that collects no data about anybody and minimize data as much as possible. And we all know you can't make digital things now without data. I mean, it's as fundamental, more fundamental than code. That's why AI is, right? And so what is privacy in that context? And so that's a thing to work through. I do think it is built to go back to the question of like public orientation or building in values. Looking at how you build technology, AI technology that doesn't undoy expose information about you or let you opt into things that are more private.

52:03So you see that with Apple Intelligence in trying to do more stuff on device and lean in that direction where it doesn't mean I'm a completely private individual, but there's So I understand if I want to keep close to myself. And we've actually funded through Mozilla Ventures, a company who's building basically the open source equivalent of a upon -telegence called Flower AI. So we think privacy, what it means is got to evolve, is got to have a lot more to do with sort of, how you think about privacy in your physical life, which is, oh, I'm going to close the blind names or I'm going to talk a little quieter.

52:38Like, there have to be ways that we can express on your desire to be seen and less seen. The digital world we're building. I just, you know, it's, what hits me is I've got, I'm gonna whisper it so she doesn't come alive, you know, Alexa listening. And she's listening all the time, right? I've got Siri here listening all the time. You can have an AI with a camera, read my lips from, you know, 100 meters away. you can shake my hand, grab a couple of skin cells, and sequence them. So, you know, I think to some degree, you know, privacy is an illusion that we like to believe in in the questions. One of the reasons we talk about trust and trust were the eye as well.

53:23So it's not about trust. So you can build that into the technology that the stuff is local, or the cameras turned off, or that whatever. And do you trust or have enough control yourself to believe that that's true? So there's constraints that can be put on all the things you just talked about. And a lot of it is either I fully control it, which is pretty hard in today's connected world as your super technical and willing to kind of put yourself on a very, you know, in an island. Or the you trust the parties that are providing. That's what Apple is good at. It's what Mozilla has been good at. Historically, I think we want to be good at in the AI era.

54:05We haven't talked a lot about where we're going with our own AI work, but it really is in the trust of really space and in the open source space. Because we think there's a lot of desire for those things. Let's say the next President of the United States comes to you and says, what are the policies you'd like the White House to enact? Do you have a clear set of recommendations? Yeah, I mean at the high level they're pretty clear. And would you share? What's interesting actually is despite that you can't get anything done, I'm Canadian, so I can make fun of the US political system. Despite that you can't pass laws, I do think you have a lot of bipartisan commonality on some of these topics.

54:47And so I think one is the antitrust law works in today's era. We haven't figured out how that works. But I think so there's space for entrepreneurs, so there's space for innovation. And I do think that's a critical thing to figure out for this era. The second is we figure out what on the right, AI, and privacy guardrails. And that's where Europe hasn't gotten it perfect. But they have a little bit right in that where they focus AI regulations on uses of AI like it's not Let's you know regulate all AI. It's like if I'm gonna use this for something that might be sensitive or dangerous or harmful Let's have guardrails on that.

55:30So we're gonna do a better version and that's you know for humanity to figure out But I think regulating that and then the third is Making sure that that animation funding is going to public goods is going to stuff that everybody can use and Frankly also that it's going to regions other than just California and Washington State. Because really one of the other things about open source is the idea that people get in and eat from anywhere. And I think you see not just corporate concentration if you companies, geographic concentration in a few places. And I think it is an opportunity for government if it's putting resources out there to spread them widely.

56:10Yeah, I mean, but I do again go in my aerospace route. So I remember, you know, NASA's space projects would be distributed among 30 congressional districts and companies, you know strategic policy was to move in a congressional district that had no aerospace supplier so they can get the contract, which makes for a lot of inefficiencies. Yeah, for sure. The good news is that we're talking about, you know, It's not worse. Yes, yeah, that's a sure. A lot's changed from there. What other policies? How do you, you know, so the question ultimately is, how do we regulate it to make sure we don't have, you know, disastrous outcomes?

56:52And how do we, you know, how do we sneak up against AGI, whatever that is? And maybe we pass it already, or digital superintelligence that disrupts the way of our lives so rapidly that it leaves our headspinning. Do you have any recommendations? There's two answers to that. I mean, I think one is just keeping an eye on the ball. And you saw this in the debates around SB 1047, the AI Safety Law that knew some veto to know the recently is really the post -words we need to build an evidence -based way to kind of look at where the real risks are and where they're not. I think it's back to like we should be regulating against risks and not just generally against, you know, amorphous fears.

57:40So it's urgent, it's important to kind of have regulation that can do that and needs to be grounded in evidence. The thing that is actually much trickier to fix, and I don't know how to fix it is we have a bureaucracy, we have political systems, designed for the industrial or even the pre -industrial age. Let's, you know, wrap on a conversation about what your prediction is on open source. What is your hope on where this is going to go? Well, my prediction and my hope are the same. And I hope my prediction comes true. So, you know, my prediction is that there will be a public option, an open source option, and that you'll see both coexisting.

58:23But I also think that the infrastructure layer that the people who are just trying to do the commoditized fundamental stuff will not be the ones who win commercially. Netscape doesn't exist anymore. So I don't know if there exists anymore, but certainly they're not the definer of the ecosystem that they were. So I do think that the infrastructure, the building blocks, to get back to that I go, Kit, we'll be open. And I think that will benefit us all if it can be true from a safety perspective, from an entrepreneurship perspective, from a safety perspective, from an entrepreneurship perspective, from a general creativity innovation perspective.

59:03So that is both my hope and my prediction. I guess the hope I layer on top of it is that we can be smart enough that if we're spending public dollars anyways on things I compute, that the government plays a fueling rule in this as it did in previous eras, and that that's something it does with intent as opposed to a kind of constraining rule and trying to micro -manage things. One last aside on here, I just got back from India, which is a nation of 1 .41 billion people, the largest on the planet, and a nation that I think needs AI for its survival. you know, you cannot provide the education and health care to the, you know, there's a hundred million people that are the tax base for the nation.

59:55The rest are in some degree of poverty and the only way you possibly provide health and education to them at scale is going to be AI on top of, you know, the GO 5G network that's there. And then I go to Greece and I meet with some leadership there and they're like, you know, help us get AI going. So for a lot of nations, right, that are not AI -centric today that are looking and feel and know that they need AI in their nation to compete and survive and thrive. How does the open source movement support them? Well, I think that is actually the core of public AI and why we were talking about that beyond just open summers, right?

1:00:43The three things are public use, public orientation, public goods, public use is like, use this stuff to deliver healthcare and education. We have to figure out how to do that well. And that's where the public orientation comes in, like build it in a way that is enabling of humans. And Darren, Darren, I come mow glue, I never get his name right there. We just won the Nobel Prize for Economics, talks about machine usefulness, right? So like, how do we actually make this to help people to humans to public hands. And then the third piece is public goods, and that's where open source comes in. It's like, let's, as we do these things, build into a commons, and certainly this government should do that, so that what India does helps grease and what America does helps India, and that that virtuous cycle begins.

1:01:28And that, you know, that's something where the best kind of human progress, I think, has come from, you know, those things on color heading up together. Mark, before we sign off, where can people find you, follow you, and find Mozilla Foundation, and how can they be involved? How can they support your work? Easy to find Mozilla at Mozilla on XTwitter, whatever you call it these days. You can find us on LinkedIn, you can find us at benzilla .org where we've been for 25 years. I'm just at a sermon on Twitter and LinkedIn, not in other of those places often, but you can find me there. And I think how you can get involved, it was really just looking at how does public AI this concept of AI and service humanity benefit you, even figuring it out selfishly, and then how do you get back?

1:02:18If your building software can be open -sourced, if you're a policy maker, can you make sure that public dollars go to public goods and so on? Amazing. Mark Sermon, an open source warrior to benefit humanity. That's my new brand for you. Thank you. I'll get the t -shirt printed here right now. Thank you for your work, Mark. Pleasure to meet you. Thanks for the conversation. Likewise, thanks for having me on Peter.