Creating a Cognitive Economy

"The best place to stimulate innovation is in the market square, not in the administrative bureau."

This was Friedrich Hayak, in 1945, arguing that centralized economies cannot drive growth efficiently. This is because a centralized body lacks access to the information needed to innovate and distribute resources efficiently. Decisive information exists locally and is lost in attempted relay to a central planner.

To induce the novelty needed to create progress, ideas themselves must be allowed to sprout up unhindered in specific instances, and receive immediate feedback that either incentivizes propagation or doesn't. Let the good ideas win, and the bad ones fade in a continuous, iterative process until an optimal solution is found. Reducing centralized control, therefore, becomes a way to harness the distributed instances of innovation, which would otherwise be stifled.

We want to create the same phenomenon in artificial intelligence.

Because our system is designed to harness machine intelligence in its purest form - the predictive power of a single model - and because the protocol allows any computer to connect - we are essentially creating a "market square" for machine intelligence. Like Hayek's vision of an efficient economy, novel progress can receive immediate feedback and reward, thus incentivizing it to continue operating in the network.

The system will thrive on diversity. Any single engineer, or group of engineers, can fine-tune a model, plug it in, and play the odds. The more diversity we can pull into the system, the more likelihood of inducing state-of-the-art results, and, because our system is scalable, and because software can be built on top of it - there is no limit to the quantity and complexity of innovation it could ultimately foster.

Ultimately, by creating an interactive, open-ended ecosystem for the development of artificial intelligence, we are not only harnessing a global supply of computing power, we are harnessing a global supply of innovation.