for someone who hasn’t really captured the idea of Open Source what does that mean most of the things you use today whether that’s you know made by Google made by Amazon made by meta or made by some startup or made by some weird artist or made by your cousin in most cases there’s a bunch of Open Source underneath it what are the motivations for someone to build the open source the mythological early open source motivation going to scratch my own itch I I’m using a piece of software it doesn’t do the thing I want it to do so I’m G to modify it or I’m going to build something and like I’m a nerd I’m going to build the thing I want share them with other nerds and I think that is still a part of it do you believe we actually have privacy oh it’s such a tricky question we struggle with what is privacy now we think privacy what it means is got to evolve welcome to moonshots today we’re going to be talking about the open source movement with Mark Surman who’s
[00:01:01] the president of Mozilla Foundation um as president he leads an effort to drive more open Equitable and trustworthy internet focusing on advancing ethical AI what does that mean what does open source mean that’s our conversation uh we’re going to be diving into a paper they just released called public AI making AI work for everyone I’m going to put the link in the show notes um and he also o put out a paper recently on trustworthy AI I’ll put that in the show notes as well so if you’ve wondered what open source means if you’ve wondered how it’s going to impact AI is llama truly open source you know dive in with me here all right let’s jump into conversation with Mark and if you like this podcast and the people I’m bringing to you please subscribe all right welcome Mark Surman before we get started I want to share with you the fact that there are incredible
[00:02:00] breakthroughs coming on the health span and Longevity front these Technologies are enabling us to extend how long we live how long we’re healthy the truth is a lot of the approaches are in fact cheap or even free and I want to share this with you I just wrote a book called Longevity guide book that outlines what I’ve been doing to reverse my biological age what I’ve been doing to increase my health my strength my energy and I want to make this available to my community at cost so longevity guidebook.com you can get information or check out the link below all right let’s jump into this episode Mark good to meet you uh in person sort of in this virtual world we live yeah this as in person as most life gets these days it it it’s crazy right we forget how um convenient it is that we can live this virtualized life and for me to have met you and have this conversation in the past um I would have had to literally jump in an air airplane
[00:03:00] flight to Toronto in this case New York where you are right now uh but uh we’re living in this extraordinary world so this conversation for me is an important one and I think I want to dive deep to understand what you think of as the open- source movement what does it mean why does it exist um what are its advantages and what are the trades right we hear about open source a lot um I’ve had conversations in the past with uh Imad mustak about this with Elon Musk with others and as president of Mozilla Foundation um it’s an area that you are advocating for um let’s jump straight in what is for someone who hasn’t really captured the idea of Open Source what does that mean I think at the very top level it means that for the last 20 years 25 years however you want to talk about it as we’ started to build out like
[00:04:01] billions of us this digital world that there is a set of Lego blocks that anybody who’s capable of using them or wants to learn how to use them can build something out of and I think that’s a I’ll Define open source in a second but I think that’s really the key piece is that underpinning most of the things you use today whether that’s you know made by Google made by Amazon made by meta or made by some startup or made by some weird artist or made by your cousin in most cases there’s a bunch of Open Source underneath it and that open source underneath it is the Lego kit that has let so many creative people so many startups like go fast because they’ve got a bunch of stuff they can take for free to start building something and then on top of it they might build something that’s closed or they sell to or or whatever so I think and that Lego kit I mean there was a recent Harvard study uh that talks about open source over over the kind of last 20 years creating 8 trillion value and
[00:05:01] so a critical part of the digital economy we’re living in but the creativity part and the money part of it come from the fact that we have this Lego kit um and so like what is well go ahead beer yeah I was going to say so we’ve got this this I think Lego kits a great description of it chunks of software that are available for anyone to use uh without cost for free is it always free there’s four there’s four things that it it means and it’s not always like always free as in beer to use an old open source Pro uh it’s free as in speech and so the four things that make a piece of software open source are you can use it without any encumbrance you can use it without paying for it you can study it so that means you can look inside it’s transparent you can see how it works you can modify it so you can turn something that you pick up into something else and you can share it again so you know share
[00:06:01] it again also means you can make money on top of it as long as you’re not charging for the thing itself and so you know that’s what makes something open source under underneath there’s a lot of how does that play out in AI debate going on right now and we can get to that too but that’s the basics Mark thanks but let me dig a little bit deeper here because I I really want to understand the core motivations and the core principles of Open Source before we dive into AI which is equally important there so uh what what are the motivations for someone to build the open-source software is it just curiosity and desire to help and there’s one other part of the question I have even the open source software that someone is building those Lego block blocks right now those are built using non-open Source elements right I mean at some point you go down and you’re saying someone’s paying for the bandwidth someone’s paying for the compute someone’s paying for the stuff
[00:07:01] that DARPA um spun out and then Microsoft took over right so it’s not as the old uh principle it’s not Turtles all the way down it’s not so open source all the way down so there’s some open source layers right so help me understand that and then the core motivations for people playing well I think it’s important and we’ll get into this I’m sure to distinguish between it costs money and it’s open source so all the way down down there stuff that costs money including you know our our time is worth something even if you know we’re not getting compensated in cash of the band with the compu the DARPA all the stuff and in fact in some ways that cost of in some ways that cost of building it can either get privatized or can turn into public goods and so that’s the nice thing about the history of DARPA and the internet right is this big public investment which turns into these open protocols not open source but open protocols which run the internet which
[00:08:01] are public goods and so they actually take public dollars tax dollars tur into something that actually is open that everybody gets the benefit from so I think we we want to just be careful there um in terms of what are some of the motivations they really vary so if you think about what are some of those building blocks Linux or Apache or Firefox or Wikipedia which is not software but let’s call it open source I mean it is open source is not software or an open AI open source I model like likeo from the Allen institute there’s a lot of motivations I think the the mythological early open source motivation was scratch my own itch right I’m using a piece of software it doesn’t do the thing I want it to do so I’m G to modify it or I’m G to build something and like I’m a nerd I’m gonna build the thing I want sharing with other nerds and I think that is still a part of it right is like I just need to make a thing for myself is really the heart of it I think L tals when he started Linux it was some combination of I want a
[00:09:01] version of Unix that works the way that I want it to work and I’m I’m going to make it but then you know as you go on it absolutely is maybe a more Collective or corporate or even you know commercially driven utility it’s the scratch my own inch but at the level of a meta or a Google or an AWS which is I need a software stack that’s going to run my cloud computing platform or that I can build a social network on and lowering the cost and increasing the reliability of that is my absolute goal I don’t want to care about the that thing I just want to make sure it works and it costs me as little as possible and that it’s as flexible as possible so that’s why say something like Linux which is really under most of the things we use on the internet in terms of cloud computing um all of those companies I just mentioned put huge amounts of money or Engineers back into Linux because it’s the plumbing and if they all
[00:10:01] basically collectivize the cost of the plumbing it becomes the standard it just works it’s much cheaper than you know buying you know Solaris or Windows NT which don’t exist anymore but the proprietary things from the past or from building it themselves so I think there’s a Next Level scratch the itch which is get the thing I want for cheaper in a way that works for me and Collective effort is the way that that works and then you know there is an end where somebody’s really Building open source as a business strategy on its own and so you know I’m red hat and I take a lot of stuff that’s already been built and leveraging everybody else scratching the itch I’m building some other open source to glue it together so it’s easier to use Linux and then I’m charging for software or not for software I’m not charging for software I’m charging for support I’m charging for other kinds of services that allow people to use what’s free uh in a way that’s more effective so I think you kind of have the personal itch you have the collective it or the kind of
[00:11:01] infrastructure play and then you have you know an open source business so it’s going to be interesting as we dive into the conversation around AI uh and I know I’m excited to hear your your thoughts you recently wrote a paper called public AI making AI work for everyone and I want to dive into that because there’s been a lot of advocacy for open source and transparency in Ai and at the same time there’s been a lot of um how do I put it uh Giga dollars put into the field a lot of capital flowing in it’s an expensive uh an energy intensive field so I want to understand how the two can it coexist you know how do you make it happen fast enough safe enough um with the proper motivations and how do you get the smartest people sort of the meritocracy to work on it
[00:12:00] uh with the right incentive so this is going to be our conversation for those listening who want to understand where we’re going to go and I’m going to play both a fan and a skeptic on both sides of the equation mark if you don’t mind please yeah so uh you know I’ve started um I don’t know seven or eight nonprofits over the years and I’ve sworn that I’m never going to start another nonprofit and um the reason for that is inefficiency uh of what I see as nonprofits and um you know I run I’m executive chairman of the X prize which I think is a highly efficient leverage you know we put up we this is we’ve launched 30 prizes over 30 years $600 million in competitions uh but we’ve got to just struggle day in and day out to raise the money to convince somebody um either with ink kind or time or donations to fund uses versus you know
[00:13:01] build a business that is churning you know revenues and I reinvest it I’ve had an argument for years that Google um even though it’s a for-profit has done such extraordinary benefits for Humanity making you know knowledge leveling the playing field making it accessible democratized and demonetized around the world that if you tried to create that kind of capability um in a nonprofit I don’t think it would I don’t think it would have been possible um given the amount of capital needed so how do you so by the way you can make the point first off that open source doesn’t mean nonprofit just uh just to begin there you made it for me Peter you made it for me so I mean open source doesn’t mean nonprofits if we go back to your original question like you know how does maybe I’ll take us implicit open source compete or or provide value or whatnot in a in a world
[00:14:01] where there’s so much money on compute it’s so expensive to do this we need the brightest Minds all of that and I I think the answer is twofold one you know our vision of Open Source and certainly you know public AI which is this broader concept which we can get to in a in a little bit isn’t that it’s exclusive from you know proprietary or Clos things open source has always done well in a world where it is a a Counterpoint a compliment right um or or something actually that comes a little bit later and replaces some commercial Innovation so Linux really is the server operating system and you don’t have the solises and the windows ntees and that’s because it just becomes such a commonplace thing that it it kind of commoditized as open source so it’s you know it’s it’s not to say open source exclusively um and then on that question like how does that get financed or how does it come to be because it’s not going to just be somebody in their basement who’s going to create the Linux of the AI era um although lots of those people are
[00:15:00] doing cool stuff you already see with um with llama for example that meta sees a very clear interest and Nvidia who’s helping them and lots of other companies who are in the open source AI space and IBM us um that the idea of moving early to commoditize and collectivize what is effectively becoming commoditized infrastructure like a lot of what I mean I think you see the core Innovations of Transformers and llms they’re going to become pretty commonplace they become commoditized isn’t it crazy that the world’s most powerful technology is effectively free yeah I mean that that just blows it blows my mind I mean if you’d gone back a decade and said listen you’re going to have these thing called large language models and you’re going to be able to ask any questions ask it to create video clips images and it’s perfect and it’s like the world’s knowledge is at your fingertips and it’s got and that a and that a company like
[00:16:01] Mata is actually putting it out there for free or that others are putting it there for free how much would you have how much would you have guessed a decade ago that a license to that for an individual would cost right I mean it’s insane it’s free well what’s interesting actually is a decade ago if i’ imagin this technology I would have imagined it was free two years ago I would not so I think we were actually in a moment as chat gbt exploded where it looked like all the stuff was going to be thrown behind apis nobody was going to release it all because there’s a lot of Open Source there still is today in AI all the way along I mean it’s how The Innovation move so fast is you have researchers scientists talking to each other writing papers sharing their code so 10 years ago five years ago I would have imagined there’s a lot and I think we got to a moment where really stuff got enclosed and locked down you think about open taking the Transformer paper
[00:17:00] innovating really boxing everything up productizing it which is good in terms of of end user value and really move quickly that you know llama was able to kind of get out there um and um you know provide basically the same thing because I think you see um that meta is playing the Linux version of that or the the Linux play I was to say what’s zuck’s motivation here is it catching up is it just taking a sort of adjacency that that gives him uh a larger fan base or different user base why did he do that I think zuck’s motivation is the same motivation I put money into Linux is I’m not if I’m meta in the llm business I’m not trying to be opena I’m in the metaverse business or the social media business or whatever business they’re going to be in and I need this current generation of technology to work as
[00:18:01] reliably and as at a low cost as possible so they put a ton of money in up front it’s a big risk to be the you know try to have llama be the Linux of the the llm era but then I just saw an interview with Jensen and and Zach where you know Nvidia is supposedly putting 200 Engineers into llama and so I think the idea is if it becomes the standard everybody pitches in and it’s a kind of Linux play and so that’s the motivation I think the the tricky thing about llama and and meta with that is they’ve put in this thing that makes llama in our view not open- source which is this weird license piece that says at 700 million users it’s no longer free for you anymore it’s no longer open source and open source licenses don’t have those caps it kind of breaks the Covenant of Open Source like imagine if Zach had built Facebook on Linux and when he hits 700 million users Ln toval like shows up
[00:19:01] in paloalto knocks on his door the Mone giant bag right it it doesn’t work that way and so I actually do think it’s a other things will emerge and and this is what actually gets to your question about nonprofits in a second that will be Pure Play open source and that will actually become the dominant infrastructure did you see the movie Oppenheimer if you did did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs that they spent billions on biod defense weapons the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA well a company called viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood now viome has a product that I’ve personally used for years called full body intelligence which collects a few drops of your blood spit and stool and can tell you so much about
[00:20:00] your health they’ve tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical Health guidance like what foods you should eat what foods you shouldn’t eat as well as your supplements and probiotics your biological age and other deep Health insights and the results of the recommendations are nothing short of Stellar you know as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle medicine after just 6 months of following biomes recommendations members reported the following a 36% reduction in depression a 40% reduction in anxiety a 30% reduction in diabetes and a 48% reduction in IBS listen I’ve been using viome for 3 years I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities best of all viome is Affordable which is part of my mission to democratize health if you want to join me on this journey go to vi.com Peter I’ve asked navine Jane a friend of mine who’s the founder and CEO viome to give my listeners a special discount
[00:21:01] you’ll find it at vom.com Peter before we go any further um I’d love you to give us a little bit of a background on Mozilla Foundation uh it’s the context when you come it’s the work that you’re doing and I think folks should should have a a little background here please well it’s it’s interesting because we get back to that question motivations Milla started in 1998 I wasn’t around I was a fanboy from the outside as the open- source project on top of the Netscape browser source code so you know Netscape was losing to Internet Explorer they’d been the first big browser after Mosaic and and so they thought well if we put it out there maybe other people will run with it and you did have red hat and sun and IBM bunch of other people contributing to the open source version of ncape which was called Milla but what really drove it was for about 5 years before Milla Foundation
[00:22:01] even existed it was just really a bunch of hackers around the world trying to beat Microsoft and so actually the motivation question was these guys stole the web from us billgates didn’t even want to have the web he didn’t believe in it and then now they’ve got 98% of browser market share they’ve got ActiveX so you can only use web pages really on Windows or inside an Internet Explorer and you know so there was a Army of very angry Geeks that said Microsoft you don’t own the internet we’re gonna show you and eventually it takes them five years they get from this clunky Milla browser that was just a kind of a slightly evolve version ncape to Firefox and Firefox is the kind of breakout of like let’s make it small let’s make it sexy for people let’s put in pop-up blockers and let’s make it sure it does JavaScript really well which sounds boring today but it was Radical because
[00:23:00] what it became was the thing that allowed people to develop interactive web apps instead of dumb web pages and the joke kind of goes like what’s the best version of Firefox ever released Internet Explorer 7 because that’s the one that had JavaScript in it and you know until you had all the browsers working with JavaScript and Ajax you couldn’t do Gmail you couldn’t do Facebook you couldn’t do Twitter so that was the set of people they really wanted the web to be open so Firefox makes a emergence and it B it takes on market share from Internet Explorer but then Chrome comes along and begins to dominate and what was it that why didn’t Firefox uh Dominate and why did Chrome what allowed Chrome to come in with such Fury well the The Cheeky second answer to the the joke about Firefox is the best version of Firefox ever is Chrome okay um because really the goal of
[00:24:00] mailla is that the whole system is open and of course we need to have enough market share which we don’t today with Firefox if you ask me um to be influential in our values so the other thing about mozzilla is it wasn’t just that kind of passionate set of people who wanted to counteract Microsoft uh that you know only focus on a browser they had a bigger dream they had the Milla Manifesto and that was really about the internet being in service of alling ity and so um you know the idea is we’ve got enough openness to shift the market towards being open and towards the kind of the tech working for people um and I would say you know Chrome came as the third real platform after internet explor in Firefox that was a boon there was a period where I we really lost the ball in terms of keeping up with the tech and it’s a it’s a lesson that is if you want to have this mission and it’s it’s going to be true now in AI of making sure that the tech
[00:25:03] has certain values you also have to be on top of the tech being great and we didn’t always stay on top of that isn’t it true you also have to be ready for verticalization I mean Chrome has succeeded as has Gmail as has Android and a thousand other things Maps because Google was large enough to verticalized and build interdependencies on these things that made it super convenient for folks to use um and I can imagine we’re going to see even more of that with AI uh in that verticalization that that deep that deep Stack Up and Down the user experience yeah it’s it’s an interesting question about where verticalization which is a natural tendency and and ultimately monopolization which is something we don’t want and is illegal in our society um you know that’s a tendency though that that will emerge from companies is trying to get as much market share and
[00:26:01] as many things as possible and disruption interact because Microsoft also found you know to be a monopolist in its era had totally verticalized right they owned the server rooms the databases the they’re trying to own the content they certainly own the browser they own the office feed all of that stuff and they get disrupted by the web and so one of the interesting questions is you know the web era and the the smartphone era verticalized as well there’s real Tendencies towards that verticalization in um you know in the AI era I mean Gemini actually even being late to the game I think has a real Advantage being built into all the of the Google Suite um what will come to disrupt that and is it you know we gotten so far along that disrupting the verticalization becomes so harder or almost impossible it’s a really critical question right now you know I I call me cynical but I think every single
[00:27:00] company and every single product eventually becomes disrupted because they be they become comfortable right I’ll never forget about six years ago Jeff Bezos goes on investor call and says yes uh in 30 years Amazon will not exist anymore or some some quote like that right saying H is trying to scare his employees or just dock his stock price but it’s everything gets disrupted right fed I mean the dominant you know overnight carrier as we see what Amazon has built um now one of the questions is there is a situation where a company a for-profit company with a great leader motivated employees just do a better job and and they can reinvest and they can as a meritocracy just continue to increase their capabilities and yeah you don’t I mean
[00:28:01] there’s a difference between monopolistic behavior and being a monopoly right if you have the best product in the world and everyone loves it and and guess what you know you got 99% market share um is that a monopolistic Behavior or is it a monopoly or is it are you just providing a fantastic product and service this is a tricky question but for the courts on a number of topics including search right it’s a it’s a great product um uh so I mean that’s that’s I guess for as we evolve our monopoly laws for for us to to figure out ultimately what you want from antitrust regulation is competition and the opportunity for people to come in and disrupt sure and so and that’s where I don’t think you’re being cynical I think you’re being hopeful when you say ultimately every company is going to Beed I believe it because every comp gets fat dumb and happy to some degree
[00:29:01] and new technologies constantly I mean that’s the laws of physics or technology we just have constant uh you know we’re in a super exponential uh period and yeah I’d say the day before something is truly a breakthrough it’s a crazy idea and we get disrupted by crazy ideas that a company that’s reporting on a quarterly basis is unwilling to take but some entrepreneur someplace is willing to they have nothing to lose so we’ll take the BET and oh my God that’s incredible um well probably that maybe five or 10 years before not the day before and that takes open from 2015 to but but I think your point is your point is right one of the things I want to pull at and it goes back to a question I didn’t answer earlier but also on this like companies are going to want to grow in this way is there also is’s a question of disruption to what end right so some people will come in and disrupt because they’ve got a great idea they want to build a company and like
[00:30:01] capitalism and companies are great at solving certain problems and creating public good and even public goods you know things that are shared Inc and contributing to Linux all that stuff but there also are things to your question of like not starting a non nonprofit the companies are just never going to be good at and so that’s where when we talk about public AI as a as a Counterpoint I don’t think that company is ever going to be good at what has happened with Linux which is a collective public good that all uh you know that all the companies who build on and researchers and everybody governments build on top of and for all it’s a pain in the ass of Linux Foundation struggles with getting enough members that is a a form of social organization that lends itself to you know being an independent third party um and unless you want to get rid of governments altoe I mean that’s another form of social in Innovation uh that has its you know I would call
[00:31:00] myself a Libertarian capitalist so that’s where I been towards yeah and I’m I’m an old Puck Anarchist and so you know sometimes we’ll have some common cause there but I I I think that the thing is you know what social forms of social organization 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 innov but Innovation comes in and YouTube comes online great and you don’t need PBS or BBC or C and and so when we have a government formed um uh provider right um I would rather have complete total open access for anybody
[00:32:01] to provide whatever they want but that comes later in the process and and I think the question to always be asking is what’s not going to happen if you just leave it to the market I think that’s that’s a very fair um 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 compan is called Fountain life and it’s a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented Physicians you know most of us don’t actually know what’s going on inside our body we’re all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side you go to the physician or the emergency room and they say listen I’m sorry to tell you this but you have this stage three or four going on and you know it didn’t start that morning it probably was a problem that’s been going on for some time but because we never look we don’t find out
[00:33:01] so what we built at Fountain life was the world’s most advanced diagnostic Centers we have four across the us today and we’re building 20 around the world these centers give you a full body MRI a brain a brain vasculature an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque dexa scan a Grail blood cancer test a full executive blood workup it’s the most advanced workup you’ll ever receive 150 gab of data that then go to our AIS and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it’s solvable you’re going to find out eventually you might as well find out when you can take action Fountain life also has an entire side of Therapeutics we look around the world for the most Advanced Therapeutics that can add 10 20 healthy years to your life and we provide them to you at our centers so if this is of interest to you please go and check it out go to Fountain
[00:34:00] life.com Peter when Tony and I wrote Our New York Times bestseller life force we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain life memberships if you go to Fountain life.com Peter will’ll put you to the top of the list really it’s something that is um for me one of the most important things I offer my entire family the CEOs of my companies my friends it’s a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans go to fountainlife decomp it’s one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners all right let’s go back to our episode so uh 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 I think that you know entrepreneurs listening to our conversation here um uh this is you know there are a few different debates going on in the AI
[00:35:01] world one is will will you know digital super intelligence destroy Humanity that’s a great debate not going to have that conversation right now will it pull all the jobs we can I’m happy to have it but thank God we’re not having it right now uh you will AI uh you know pull our jobs will they will it help us uh create you know uh longevity and and fusion the answer is yes but we’ll get back to that later uh but uh the question of how do we assure safety and uh 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 the commercial interests are part of driving The Innovation is a great thing and you know you often have these dances if you think about the internet overall
[00:36:01] between you know non-commercial research like deep Innovation so whether that’s DARPA and the internet or CERN and the web that then you know you actually figure out what to do with it and there’s a lot of commercial drivers of of innovation from there and then you know often afterwards there’s a role for what is a commercial player not doing where you know you take Firefox or Wikipedia or uh 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 also is a public option that complements it not you know just at a kind of motherhood and apple pie but because it is really important in doing
[00:37:00] the things we talked about before what won’t the market do on its own and 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 it right but if we actually want to protect Humanity the idea that there’s one or two vend ERS or 10 vendor like cornering the market on safety is a dangerous game for Humanity having it 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 and that’s but isn’t that I I agree with you it’s a key piece but isn’t that the role of the government versus um open source or any particular company you know I’m when I think about why governments should exist and not and where are they
[00:38:02] not overreaching and this is a delicate balance um safety for the population it represents for me whether it’s safety from armed forces or police or regulation um is like the most fundamental thing I think a government should provide um do you agree with that absolutely absolutely and 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 uh finding that having that having that regulation is the role of government what are the guard rails and you know you take something like the evolution of Transportation I’m happy there are traffic laws and safety laws and that is the proper role of government and building cars is the proper role of the private sector um public transportation is a thing you know that kind of sits in between so I agree providing safety absolutely you know regulating the guard
[00:39:01] rails on safety absolutely the role 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 and so the whole history of open science and everybody looking together to drive I forward you know with enough eyes all bugs are shallow you know 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 the government’s job to do the implementation on the flip side on the flip side having a few people trying 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
[00:40:00] entrepreneurs to solve problems you I think about you mentioned Transportation I think about the you know in the space industry which is my earlier uh part of my life uh you know it was lock heat 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 shut under contractors and then Here Comes Elon as a disruptor and captures 99% 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 but we’ll see we’ll see relativity space and um uh and uh Bezos um with blue origin come in and those will become the second suppliers uh but I I don’t think you could have ever gotten to the level of innovation
[00:41:01] and Brilliance in a um a governmental program or a um a governmentally driven program it was like just getting the very best people in the 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 um in open source um or is it some segments of open SCE and not others well I think open source and governments are different so I think the role of governments is either to create guard rails or to fund public goods and so youly you think about DARPA funding public goods I mean you got a lot of innovation to some degree speed although was a long game you know out the government’s playing that funding public goods role you can get that in open source I do think the role of Open Source often though is after some of the high-speed entrepreneurial inovation happens so you know you see Linux comes
[00:42:01] like 10 years a half a generation after Solaris or Windows NT and it’s like we want a different thing we want to collectivize this and make it infrastructure Firefox can comes 10 years after net skate Wikipedia comes 10 years after incard but if you still have one of those CD ROMs you know you get a prize um but you know I think the role of Open Source is actually to create often the more malleable public good version of what has been driven by commercial Innovation so on this first point of AI development is dominated by commercial interests uh do is there so that that is a truth and is continuing um 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 right yeah and the so what is and you won’t get to the the public goods you need in terms of keeping the market open for smaller players in terms of research in terms of safety I think you need open source and truly open
[00:43:01] source that that operates in a kind of way that we all um we all have access to and doesn’t get cut off at but if the open source if the open source yeah yeah please I think in the in the so and and how if you would and how that should yeah so the why is things like maybe I already talked about them we have the Lego 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 I have a little 2 by two Matrix I have which is like open closed private you know commercial public and you see different people you know kind of down in the commercial but open you you have meta trying to play I 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 Allen before he he died El Super AI which he made he made
[00:44:00] which he made the money to fund that from a monopolistic activity mean you have you have a tax system that supports philanthropy in America so uh that that’s what is supposed to happen um so you know he really believed in open AI he really believed in open source AI uh and you have an amazing guy Ali fate leading that I think that could become the Linux or the Linux Foundation of this era um and so you know both of those are useful players to to kind of have out there I do think one of the critical things that we’re missing right now is in every Western Country you’re seeing huge amounts of money being thrown at compute or huge kind of looking at you how we 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 as a the company that should Produce open source out the other end of
[00:45:00] the process if public dollars pay for it public goods should come out the other end yeah IM mustak has 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 uh for for nation I think it’s I agree with him 100% that it’s infrastructure and it’s not just the computer it’s it’s the models it’s the whole stack we did a big paper on that with a bunch of other people including Yan laon was a was a part of it um at an event last year or earlier this year and 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 can have the Spanish language lo you can have the
[00:46:01] Spanish uh 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 for democracy but I 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 lean on would 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 uh 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 free 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
[00:47:00] and you know values that I hold dear and I think private companies are part of it I also think public AI is Central to it I 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 Ian it’s 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 that you basically have you know 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 and what we don’t have is a high-speed fast approach to how do we build democratic pluralis IC Ai and I’m kind of kind of buy into that
[00:48:00] is yes go fast and go fast not just to back you know somebody owning the market in the west but go fast towards something that is a set of players building something that supports democracy and pluralism and you make money off of 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 cytic that kills scile cells in your skin and 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 uh if you’re interested check out the show notes I’ve asked my team to link to it below all right let’s get back to the episode I mean there is a scenario where uh companies and the meritto the best meritocracies um are attracting the very best people with the most Capital the most compute
[00:49:01] are building the best systems and then the government becomes a user of those systems to support its people um in the same way that NASA didn’t build you know Starship you know kudos to Elon for flight five but is going to become one of the largest users of Starship so um can we deliver on on the public good uh with private private models and private companies yes and I there’s always going to be stuff that private companies don’t do and there are private companies who play totally in a black box like open Ai 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 with llama and so I think there’s a you have to take a Nuance view of how do you get
[00:50:02] to that stuff and our view is you want both commercial and government and nonprofit or open source Community Players all pushing towards this kind of pluralistic open you know and public AI option alongside everything else not to exclusive you know alongside everything else it’s not exclusive I I I get it and I agree um and as long as you know again the government is not mandating um but it’s enabling uh the emergence of those of those resources of those uh you know open- Source teams and perspectives and so forth I mean that makes complete complete sense can I ask another question because I think uh privacy is one of the main is a big driver for for Mozilla yes absolutely do you believe we actually
[00:51:01] have privacy oh it’s such a tricky question so privacy is a core in the you know something like an individual’s privacy and security is sacran it doesn’t quite say sacran but is in the Milla Manifesto It’s one of the core and and and we struggle with what is privacy now because we for us privacy was make a browser that collect no data about anybody and minimize data as as as much as possible and we all know you can’t make digital things now without data I mean it’s it’s as fundamental more fundamental than code that’s what AI is right and so what is privacy in that context and and so that’s a thing to work through I I do think it is buil to go back to the question of like public orientation or building in values and looking at how you build technology AI technology that doesn’t unduly expose information about you or lets you opt
[00:52:01] into things that are more private so 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 some stuff I want to keep close to myself and we’ve actually funded through Milla Ventures a company who’s building the basically the open source equivalent of appal intelligence called flower AI so we 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 G to close the blinds or I’m gonna talk a little quieter like we there have to be ways we can express a desire to be seen and less seen in the digital world we’re building I just you know it’s it what it hits me is I’ve got I’m going to whisper it so she doesn’t come alive you know Alexa listening um and she’s listening all the time right I’ve got I’ve got Siri here
[00:53:00] listening all the time you can have an AI with a camera read my lips from you know 100 MERS 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 and the question one of the reasons we talk about trust and trustworthy AI as well because you can build that into the technology that the stuff is local or the camera is turned off or that whatever and do you TR trust 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 you’re super technical and willing to kind of put yourself on a very in in an island or that you trust the the parties that are providing and that’s what apple is good at it’s what
[00:54:01] Milla has been good at historically I think we want to be good at in the AI era we haven’t talked a lot about where we’re going with our own AI work but it really is in the trustworthy 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 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 share you know 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 uh despite that you can’t pass laws I do think you have a lot of bipartisan commonality on some of these topics and so I think one is you know 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 and there’s space for Innovation and I do
[00:55:01] think that’s critical uh you know a critical thing to figure out for this era the second is we figure out what are the right Ai and privacy guard rails and that’s where Europe hasn’t gotten it perfect but they have a little bit right in that where they focused AI regulations on uses of AI like it’s not let’s you know regulate all AI it’s like if I’m going to use this for something that might be sensitive or dangerous or harmful let’s have guard rails on that so we got to 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 Innovation 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 you know really one of the other things about open source is the idea that people can innovate from anywhere and I think you see not just corporate concentration in
[00:56:00] a few companies Geographic concentration in a few places and I think it is a opportunity for government if it’s putting resources out there to spread them widely yeah I mean but I do again going my Aerospace routes I remember you know NASA’s uh space projects would be distributed among 30 congressional districts and and Company’s you know strategic policy was to move in a congressional district that had no Aerospace suppliers so they can get the contract which makes for a lot of inefficiencies um yeah for sure the good news is that we’re talking about you know bits not yes yeah for sure A lot’s changed from from there what other 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 um outcomes and how do we you know how do we sneak up against AGI whatever ever that is and maybe we passed it already or digital super
[00:57:00] intelligence that disrupts um disrupts the way of our lives so rapidly that it leaves our head spinning um do you have any recommendations there’s two answers to that I mean I think one is just keeping our eye on the ball and you know you saw this in the debates around SP 1047 that the AI safety law that new some veto recently is really the push towards we need to build an evidence-based way to kind of look at where are the real risks and where are they not and it gets back to like we should be regulating against risks and not just generally against you know amorphous fears so it’s it’s urgent it’s important to kind of have regulation that can do that it needs to be grounded in evidence the thing that is actually much stricter 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 uh wrap on a on a conversation about um
[00:58:03] what your prediction is on open source what is your hope um on where this is going to go well my prediction and my hope are the same and I hope my prediction comes true uh so you know my prediction is that there will be a public option an open source option and that you’ll you’ll see both coexisting but 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 you know Netscape doesn’t exist anymore son I don’t know if they exist anymore but certainly they’re not the definer of the the ecosystem that they were so I do think that the infrastructure the building blocks to get back to that Lego kit will be open and I think that will benefit us all if it can be true from a safety perspective from an entrepreneur from a safety perspective from an entrepreneurship perspective from a kind
[00:59:00] of just general creativity Innovation perspective so 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 like compute that the government plays a fueling role in this as it did in previous eras um and that it you know that that’s something it does with intent as opposed to a kind of constraining role and trying to micromanage things you now one one last aside on on here I just got back from India which is you know a nation of 1.41 billion people the largest on the planet and a a nation that I think needs AI for its survival um you know you cannot provide the education and health care to the you know there’s 100 million people that are the D the tax base um for the nation the rest are in some degree of poverty and the only way you possibly provide health
[01:00:03] and education to them at scale is going to be AI on top of you know the go 5G Network that’s that’s there um and then I go to Greece and I meet with some of the leadership there and they’re like you know help us get AI going so for a lot of Nations right that are not AI uh Centric today that are looking and feel and know that they need AI in their in their Nation uh to compete and survive and thrive um how does the open source movement support them well I think that is actually the core of public Ai and why we are talking about that Beyond just open source right the three things are public use public orientation public goods public use is like use this stuff to deliver healthc care and education we have to figure 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
[01:01:00] Darren akoglu I never get his name right the who just won the Noble Prize for economics talks about machine usefulness right so like how do we actually make this helpful to humans to public ends and then the third piece is public goods and that’s where open source comes in is like let’s as we do these things build into a Commons and certainly this governments should do that so that what India does helps Greece and what America does helps help India and that that virtuous cycle begins and that you know that’s something where the best kind of human progress I think has come from you know those things all kind of adding up together Mark before we sign off where can people find you follow you and find Milla foundation and how can they be involved how can they support your work easy to find Milla mazilla on X Twitter whatever 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 uh and you know I’m just m serman on on Twitter and Linkedin uh I’m
[01:02:01] kind of not in either of those places often but you can find me there and um I think how you can get involved it is 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 give back if you’re building software can it be open source if you’re a policy maker can you make sure that public dollars go to public goods and so on amazing Mark Surman an open- Source Warrior to benefit Humanity that’s my new it’s my new brand for you all right well I’m happy I I’ll I’ll get the T-shirt printed here right now thank you for your work Mark a pleasure to meet you thanks for the conversation likewise thanks for having me on Peter [Music]