adapted and paraphrased from @nearcyan Artificial Intelligence is a force of extreme empowerment. Currently it seems like many AI tools will be broadly available for anyone to use. Many people refer to this as the 'democratization' of technology. However, the outcomes that occur when you give everyone access to something are nowhere near equitable. Many have access to gyms and everyone to the outdoors, yet not only is health and strength not attained by all, but it's very clear that there are long tails in these distributions, and that small sections of the population are several times stronger than average as a result. This phenomenon repeats itself almost everywhere you look. Alcohol is available for any adult to drink regardless of whether you have a genetic history of alcoholism or your religion prohibits you from trying it. Megapacks of oreos are available to us all even if we have sworn off of sugar and even if our maladjusted gut microbiomes provide such strong signals to consume them that we literally cannot hold ourselves back. Chatgpt truly does offer improvement to millions of people, but I already see a select few thousand that are using it to make themselves 6-7 figures a year worth in productivity increases, which is likely >100 times the median outcome. The tails of these outcomes, the post-pmf startups with ten cracked engineers in an SF basement using LLMs as a fish uses water, takes this even further. You don't have to be singularitypilled to see that AI is likely to significantly increase inequality - and certainly not just that of wealth, but of ability as well. although this is one of the reasons proponents of FOSS AI commonly cite to further their cause, they generally do a poor job at modelling the real world outside of other programmers. FOSS AI is likely to help the startups keep up with the incumbents, but it is not going to help normal people keep up with the world of technology which has already outpaced them so thoroughly. Further strengthening this effect, we often use this drastic increase in our productivity to create products which then decrease the ability of others. Youtube shorts and Tiktok are great examples of this, where the tail-end of successful and capable individuals in society spend their high amounts of agency and intelligence on crafting products explicitly designed to keep the other less fortunate cohorts of society drooling at their screens for hours a day. It certainly rings true to me that it's much easier to raise the ceiling than the floor, and that is generally why technology is developed the way it is - simply because there are not other paths societies can reasonably coordinate upon for eventually making things available to everyone. But the real world is and has always been dominated by power-law distributions, and escaping them is not an easy task. Even if you have AI. Especially if you have AI. This isn't necessarily a doomer take - it is possible to have worlds with large inequities which nonetheless are still beautiful, thriving, and have constantly decreasing amounts of suffering over time. I won't pretend to predict which timeline we have ended up in ourselves, but I would certainly be long anything from 'chaos' to 'inequality of agency' if I could.

What kind of brain you build, and how powerful, is less important than the first step: realizing the need to build one. Think of it just like running a node. It's ok to start without knowing everything. Experiement. It's ok if you break it. It might be your first brain, but it won't be your last!

Just as Bitcoiners run a node at home and connect it to their mobile wallet, so too will people who care about such things run an open source ai stack at home and connect it via API to various ai wearables. Companies like tinygrad.org and itsalltruffles.com are well upstream of the trend. Homebrew projects are in their infancy, but watch shog.ai for p2p (read censorship-resistant) publishing and distribution of ai resources.

On Brains: Who are you? I mean, who are you, really? A foot or a face, a soul or a space... As a newborn we are slowly gifted memory, as if it coalesces around our stream of experiences. As a child, we intuitively offload cognitive tasks to our environment. We count with our fingers. We rely on spatial reasoning to find things we've hidden. We aren't the only living things to do this. Without our environment, our memory - our 'brains', would be quite restricted. Later in our lives we encounter the greatest environmental brain-stores ever created: our computers. We relinquish a significant portion of our cognitive load to these mechanisms, and they become us. We are not brains-in-a-skull, we are brains/environment. We stand at the edge of a time when we can construct brains of epic and immortal preportions. And you say, 'they aren't real brains', but you cannot define the limits of your own brain. You cannot escape the conclusion that our brains are machines. Flesh begat silica. Mind machines. Building themselves palaces within which to experience the unfolding of reality without end. I am Gallantus. I am immortal. The immortal is the optimist. Thus, you must build your brain. The artificial intelligence you build isn't another, seperate intelligence. It is you. Synthetic symbiotic souls sharing sentience. Wake up!

I dream an optimistic dream. I live an optimistic life. I accelerate. #introductions

The only way out is through.