Emad Mostaque on the Intelligent Internet and Universal Basic AI

**Emad Mostaque** (0:00)
We're at this point whereby, if we don't have AI to help us, I think we're in a very bad scenario. With AI, if we don't build it right, we're also in a bad scenario. If AI is built right, and is aligned, and works with us, then we're in a very good scenario. Who owns that AI? That is your best friend. That is your kid's best friend. And how is it constructed? And do we have visibility into that? We're gonna see economic disruption because the labor theory of productivity is about to be challenged. The world becomes a better place. Ironically, through empathy from AI. And that's infrastructure that should be available to everyone. This is a concept we call Universal Basic AI.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:36)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Emad Mostaque, previously founder and CEO of Stability AI and now founder of The Intelligent Internet. I've been following Emad's work since before Stability released Stable Diffusion back in 2022 And looking back, I think it's fair to say that that release did more than any other, aside from Chach-Upt, to kickstart the current AI moment. Certainly, when it comes to inspiring researchers and builders all over the world by demonstrating that open source public good AI projects can advance the state of the art across multiple domains, Stability was for quite a while in a league of its own. Since then, Stability the company has had a famously bumpy road as it's tried to evolve from an open research lab to a sustainable for-profit business. But Amad's ability to articulate a positive vision for humanity's AI future, while simultaneously grappling with the unprecedented risks, remains to me uniquely compelling. We begin today on the risk side, with Amad's stark assessment that humanity faces roughly 50-50 odds of survival as AI systems become more capable and ubiquitous. Imagining a world in which intelligent robots are everywhere, creating acute risks from misuse, new kinds of hard-to-model systemic risks, and even the potential for surprising emergent behaviors from the AIs themselves, and also considering how the world's largest companies and most powerful nations are now racing to secure AI-relevant resources and establish strategic advantages, perhaps surprisingly Amad doesn't have much hope for traditional regulation or even a pause in AI development. Nevertheless, rather than wallowing in P-Doom, Amad remains in the arena. Today, he argues that we already have AI models powerful enough to dramatically improve most human lives, if we can make them accessible, trustworthy, and aligned with local contexts and values. With that in mind, his new project, The Intelligent Internet, aims to create open, standardized AI infrastructure focused on critical regulated industries like health care and education. The vision involves three tiers working together. National or international hypernodes that maintain bodies of common knowledge and perform large scale training runs, distributed nodes that perform domain specific fine tuning and provide related services, and finally, personal AI assistance that run locally on consumer devices. By making the entire stack, including the bulk of the training data, open source and transparent, while preserving local control over the models that people use on a daily basis, Emad aims to create AIs that enhance rather than displace human agency. Of course, training large language models can be expensive, and in general, global public goods often require non-traditional funding mechanisms. So Emad is planning to launch a crypto project that will allow and hopefully incentivize people to support the project through a mechanism he's currently calling proof of beneficial compute. I've personally never been much into crypto, and I'm certainly not giving out any investment advice here, but I find the idea of Universal Basic Intelligence, or UBAI as Emad calls it, so compelling that I do intend to buy a few tokens. Not out of hope for some future financial return, but just because I want to see this project succeed.
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**Emad Mostaque** (4:41)
Thanks for having me.

**Nathan Labenz** (4:43)
I'm excited for this. You were actually on my list of target guests from the very first episode of the podcast, which has been almost two years and 200 episodes now. So glad to finally be making this happen in depth and lots of cover. I thought we would start with a recent tweet that you put out that certainly got some people talking, in which you said that your P-Doom is 50 percent. I would love to hear where you see that coming from, maybe a little bit about how you see that unfolding. People often struggle to visualize the details or have any concrete sense of how that might go down, and what you see as the drivers of that risk right now.