EP. 241 - OpenOrigins: Cryptographic Provenance for the AI Era

Ari Abelson (0:00)

What we're witnessing now is pretty remarkable. It's AI models that are becoming increasingly better at a pace that we, I think, almost can't catch up to anymore, right? Like Astra and Fable are really good examples of this.

What it means is, initially, when OpenOrigins started, the problems we were really concerned about were synthetic content. But over the last, I would say, year, especially the last year, the landscape has changed fundamentally, right? And the cybersecurity risks are now the thing that I think are the predominant fear. Systems that we thought were deeply stable and deeply secure are supposed to be erupted.

Narb (0:32)

Welcome to the DevNTell Podcast, where founders, hackers and anyone in between showcase their products built on the bleeding edge of tech. GMGM, welcome to the show, guys. I'm ecstatic to have you on today.

Ari Abelson (0:45)

Yeah, thanks for having us. Great to be on here.

Narb (0:47)

Excellent, excellent. Yes, happy Friday.

And yeah, I know you guys are working on some important tech, especially for the AI landscape that we live in today. So I'm really excited to learn more about what you guys are doing, as I'm sure our audience is. But before we get into that, would you just like to give an introduction about yourselves?

Dr. Manny Ahmed (1:15)

Sure, I'll go first.

I'm Manny, the founder of OpenOrigins. Before starting OpenOrigins, I was an academic. I did my PhD in post-doc at the University of Cambridge, where I did my thesis on consensus algorithms and distributed computing. And so I got to know the crypto world from theoretical lens. You know, I also worked on a lot of systems that were used by journalists. So I got into OpenOrigins or the idea of OpenOrigins by working with journalists on whistleblowing systems. So one of the things that we worked on during my PhD was designing a whistleblowing system that allowed sources to contact journalists anonymously, even if they are under a mass surveillance state. And now that system is used by organizations like The Guardian.

That's it. Pass it over to Ari.

Ari Abelson (2:10)

Hi, I'm Ari. I'm co-founder of OpenOrigins. Well, OpenOrigins has been running for about half a decade now, so I feel like most of my identity is associated with this company now. But before that, I was working as a misinformation researcher on projects for the Ministry of Defense and for large technology companies.

I've been in startups for most of my career. In those projects is when I started to pivot and understand where we're about to approach and about to reach in the landscape of AI, which was hyper-realistic synthetic content, disruptive communication systems, and that's where the genesis interest in what we're building at OpenOrigins came to be. How do you govern AI models? How do you ensure that we can understand what AI systems are actually doing and how we can interact with them in healthy and sustainable ways? But yeah, that's my background.

Narb (3:04)

Amazing. And how did your guys' paths intersect? And how did you guys find each other and co-found the company?

Ari Abelson (3:13)

Yeah. So I mean, I can answer this. We met at an incubator. So at Entrepreneur First, we were building different things at the time. So Manny had just started thinking about the concept of OpenOrigins and actually left the incubator to start the genesis roots of the company. I was building a different company at the time with somebody else. And then we came together several months later, maybe a year later actually, and started thinking about OpenOrigins and building that together.

I kind of collaborated on that.

Narb (3:45)

Excellent. And is it just you two or do you guys have a full-fledged team under here as well? Yeah.

Dr. Manny Ahmed (3:53)

No, we've got an engineering team based out of the UK. And then we've got our business team here. There are 15 people right now.

Narb (4:01)

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. And like I mentioned, you guys are doing some important work. But for the audience who might not realize what's kind of going on or might just be getting into AI themselves, I guess could either of you or both of you kind of touch on the current state of generative AI and what its impact has been on, I mean, at least social media and why it's so important for people to be able to distinguish that type of content from human generated content.

Yeah.

Dr. Manny Ahmed (4:39)

Do you want to dig this or should I dig it?

Ari Abelson (4:40)

You know, I can dig a bit. I can give a small take if you want to add. I think that what we're witnessing now is pretty remarkable, which is it's a self iterative flywheel, right? It's AI models that are becoming increasingly better at a pace that we I think almost can't catch up to anymore, right? So like Astra and Fable are really good examples of this.