Should AI Be Open-Sourced? The Debate That Will Shape Everything w/ Mark Surman | EP #136

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 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 was scratch my own itch. I'm using a piece of software, it doesn't do the thing I want it to do. So I'm going 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 it 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, has got to evolve.

Welcome to Moonshots. Today we're going to be talking about the open source movement with Mark Sermon, who's the president of Mozilla Foundation. 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. We're going to be diving into a paper they just released called Public Making AI Work for Everyone. I'm going to put the link in the show notes. And he also 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 the conversation with Mark, and if you like this podcast and the people I'm bringing to you, please subscribe. All right, welcome, Mark Sermon. Before we get started, I want to share with you the fact that there are incredible 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 Guidebook 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 longevityguidebook.com you can get information or check out the link below. All right, let's jump into this episode. Mark, good to meet you in person, sort of in this virtual world we live in.

Yeah, yeah. As in person as most life gets these days.

It's crazy, right? We forget how convenient it is that we can live this virtualized life. And for me to have met you and have this conversation in the past, I would have had to literally jump in an airplane, fly to Toronto, in this case New York, where you are right now. But 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? What are its advantages, and what are the trades? We hear about Open Source a lot. I've had conversations in the past with Imad Mustach about this, with Elon Musk, with others, and as president of Mozilla foundation, it's an area that you are advocating for. Let's jump straight in. 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've started to build out, like 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. 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 you or, or whatever. So I think. And that LEGO kit, I mean, there was a recent Harvard study that talks about Open source over the kind of last 20 years creating $8 trillion in value. And so a critical part of the digital economy we're living in, both the creativity part and the money part of it, come from the fact that we have this LEGO kit. Well, go ahead, Peter.

Yeah, I was going to Say so we've got this. This, I think Lego kit's a great description of it. Chunks of software that are available for anyone to use without cost, for free. Is it always for free?

There's four things that it means, and it's not always like always free as in beer to use an old open source trope. 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 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 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 what are the motivations for someone to build the open source software? Is it just curiosity and desire to help? And then one other part of the question I have, even the open source software that someone is building, those Lego 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 that DARPA spun out and then Microsoft took over, right? So it's not, as the old principle, it's not turtles all the way down, it's not 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 there's stuff that costs money, including, you know, our time is worth something, even if, you know, we're not getting compensated in cash or the bandwidth, the compute, the darpa, all the stuff. And in fact, in some ways that costs, 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, open source, but open protocols which run the Internet, which are public goods. And so they actually take public dollars, tax dollars, turn into something that actually is open, that everybody gets to benefit from. So I think we want to just be careful. There's. 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. It is open source, it's not Software or an OpenAI open source AI model like Alma from the Allen Institute. There's a lot of motivations. I think the mythological early open source motivation was scratch my own itch. I'm using a piece of software, it doesn't do the thing I want it to do. So I'm going 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, right? Is like, I just need to make a thing for myself is really the heart of it. I think Linus Torvalds, when he started Linux, it was some combination of I want a version of Unix that works the way that I want it to work and I'm going to make it. But then as you go on, it absolutely is maybe a more collective or corporate or even commercially driven utility. It's the scratch my own itch. 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 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, 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 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. 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 in a way that's more effective. So I think you kind of have the personal itch, you have the collective itch or the kind of infrastructure play and then you have an open source business.

So it's going to be interesting as we dive into the conversation around AI. And I know, I'm excited to hear 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, how do I put it? Giga dollars put into the field, a lot of capital flowing in. It's an expensive and energy intensive field. So I want to understand how the two can coexist. How do you make it happen fast enough, safe enough with the proper motivations? And how do you get the smartest people, sort of the meritocracy to work on it with the right incentive. 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 the fan and a skeptic on both sides of the equation. Mark, if you don't mind, please. Yeah. So I've started, 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 the reason for that is the inefficiency of what I see as nonprofits. And I'm executive chairman of the xprize, which I think is a highly efficient leveraged. We've launched 30 prizes over 30 years, $600 million in competitions. But we've got to just struggle day in and day out to raise the money to convince somebody either with in kind or time or donations to fund us versus build a business that is churning revenues and I reinvest it. I've had an argument for years that Google, even though it's a for profit, has done such extraordinary benefits for humanity. Making knowledge, leveling the playing field, making it accessible, democratized and demonetized around the world. That if you tried to create that kind of capability in a nonprofit, I don't think it would have been possible 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, 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 of like, you know, how does maybe I'll take as implicit open source compete or provide value or whatnot? You know, in a world 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 think the answer is twofold. One, you know, our vision of open source and certainly, you know, public AI, which is this broader concept we can get to in a little bit, isn't that it's exclusive from proprietary or closed things. Open source has always done well in a world where it is a counterpoint, a compliment, right? 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 Solaris and the Windows NTs. And that's because it just becomes such a commonplace thing that it kind of commoditizes as open Source. So it's, you know, it's not to say open Source exclusively. 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. Although lots of those people are doing cool stuff. You already see with, with Llama, for example, that Meta sees a very clear interest in Nvidia, who's helping them and lots of other companies who are in the open source AI space and IBM us 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 are 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 just, it blows my mind. I mean if you'd gone back a decade and said, listen, you're going to have these things 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 company like Meta is actually putting it out there for free, or the 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'd imagined 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 ChatGPT exploded, where it looked like all this 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 means it's how the innovation moves 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 opening I taking the Transformer paper, innovating, really boxing everything up, productizing it, which is good in terms of end user value and really move quickly that, you know, Llama was able to kind of get out there and provide basically the same thing. Because I think you see that Meta is playing the Linux version of that or the Linux play.

I would just say what's Zuck's motivation here? Is it catching up? Is it just taking a sort of adjacency that that gives him 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 open AI, 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 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 LLM era. But then I just saw an interview with Jensen and Zuck 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 that the tricky thing about Llama 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 Zuck had built Facebook on Linux and when he hit 700 million users, Linus Torvalds like shows up in Palo Alto, knocksball with a bag.

Giant bag.

It doesn't work that way. And so I actually do think it's other things will emerge. And this 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.

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Well, it's interesting because we get back to that question. Motivations. Mozilla 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. Netscape was losing to Internet Explorer and they'd been the first big browser after Mosaic.

I remember it well.

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, a bunch of other people contributing to the open source version of Netscape, which was called Mozilla. But what really drove it was for about five years before Mozilla foundation 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. Bill Gates 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 of Internet Explorer. And you know, so there was an army of very angry geeks that said, Microsoft, you don't own the Internet. We're going to show you. And eventually it takes them five years they get from this clunky Mozilla browser that was just a kind of a slightly evil version of Netscape 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 sure it does JavaScript really well. Which sounds boring today, but was radical because 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 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 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 dominate and why did Chrome. What allowed Chrome to come in with such fury?

Well, the cheeky second answer to the joke about Firefox is the best version of Firefox ever is Chrome. Because really the goal of Mozilla 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, to be influential in our values. So the other thing about Mozilla is it wasn't just that kind of passionate set of people who wanted to counteract Microsoft, that only focus on a browser. They had a bigger dream. They had the Mozilla manifesto and that was really about the Internet being in service of all humanity. And so 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. And I would say Chrome came as a third real platform after Internet Explorer and Firefox. That was a boon. There was a period where 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 and I of making sure that the tech 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 verticalize and build interdependencies on these things that made it super convenient for folks to use. And I can imagine we're going to see even more of that with AI in that verticalization, that deep stack up and down the user experience.

It's an interesting question about where verticalization, which is a natural tendency, and ultimately monopolization, which is something we don't want and is illegal in our society. That's a tendency though, that will emerge from companies that is trying to get as much market share and 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 room, the databases, the, they're trying to own the content. They certainly owned the browser, they owned the office suite, 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 smartphone era are verticalized as well. There's real tendencies towards that verticalization in the AI era. I mean, Gemini actually even being late to the game, I think has a real advantage being built into all of the Google suite. What will come to disrupt that? And have we gotten so far along that disrupting the verticalization becomes so hard or almost impossible? It's a really critical question right now.

You know, call me cynical, but I think every single company and every single product eventually becomes disrupted because they become comfortable. Right? I'll never forget about six years ago, Jeff Bezos goes on an investor call and says, yes, in 30 years Amazon will not exist anymore. Or some quote like that, right? Saying, I don't know if he's trying to scare his employees or just doc is stock price, but everything gets disrupted. FedEx, the dominant overnight carrier. As we see what Amazon has built 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 they can reinvest and they can, as a meritocracy, just continue to increase their capabilities. And yeah, you don't. I mean, 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 guess what, you got 99% market share. 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 before the courts on a number of topics including search right now. It's a great product. So I mean that I guess for as we evolve our monopoly laws for us to figure out, ultimately what you want from antitrust regulation is competition and the opportunity for people to come in and disrupt.

Sure.

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 disrupt.

I believe it because every company gets fat, dumb and happy to some degree. And new technologies constantly, I mean that's the laws of physics or technology. We just have constant. We're in a super exponential period. And 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.

Well, probably maybe five or 10 years before, not the day before before. And that takes a banana in 2015. But I think 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 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 capitalism and companies are great at solving certain problems and creating public good and even public goods, you know, things that are shared in common, 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 a company is ever going to be good at what has happened with Linux, which is a collective public good that all, you know, that all the companies who build on it and researchers and everybody. Governments build on top of and for all. It's a pain in the ass that Linux foundation struggles with getting enough members. That is a form of social organization that lends itself to being an independent third party. And unless you want to get rid of governments altogether, I mean that's another form of social innovation that has its.

You know, I would call myself a libertarian capitalist. So that's where I bend towards.

Yeah, and I'm, I'm an old anarchist and so you know, sometimes we'll have some common cause there. But 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, but innovation comes in and YouTube comes online.

Great. And then you don't need PBS or BBC or cbs.

And so when we have a government formed provider, I would rather have complete and total open access for anybody to provide whatever they want.

But that comes later in the process. And I think the question to always be asking is what's not going to happen if you just leave it to the market Sure.

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I'm happy to have it, but thank God we're not.

Will AI pull our jobs? Will it help us create longevity and fusion? The answer is yes, but we'll get back to that later. But the question of how do we assure safety 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 that commercial interests are a part of driving the innovation is a great thing. And you know, you often have these dances if you think about the Internet overall 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 innovation from there. And then, you know, often afterwards there's a rule for what is a commercial player not doing? Where you take Firefox or Wikipedia or Linux as examples, where the nonprofit players come and play a really hugely 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. It's where what we see and want to accelerate is that there also is a public option that complements it, not just at a kind of motherhood and apple pie, but because it is really important in doing 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 of it, right? But if we actually want to protect humanity, the idea that there's one or two vendors or 10 vendors, 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 is a key.

I agree with you. It's a key piece. But isn't that the role of the government versus open source or any particular company? You know, when I think about why governments should exist and not. And where are they not overreaching. And this is a delicate balance. Safety for the population it represents. For me, whether it's safety from armed forces or police or regulation is like the most fundamental thing I think a government should provide. Do you agree with that?

Absolutely. 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 finding that having that, having that regulation is the role of government. What are the guardrails? 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. Public transportation is a thing, you know, that kind of sits in between. So I agree. Providing safety, absolutely. Regulating the guardrails on safety, absolutely the role of 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 AI forward with enough eyes. All bugs are shallow. That old open source principle, to me, that's actually 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, having a few people try 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 entrepreneurs to solve problems. I think about. You mentioned transportation. I think about in the space industry, which is my earlier part of my life, it was Lockheed and Boeing, sort of the large defense contractors that were launching humanity into space. And here comes. And they were dominant by far, right. And the government is building the space shuttle 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 exist is the government likes having a second supplier in place. But we'll see Relativity Space and Bezos with Blue Origin come in and those will become the second suppliers. But I don't think you could have ever gotten to the level of innovation and brilliance in a governmental program or a governmentally driven program. It was like just getting the very best people 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 in open source or is it some segments of open source and not others?

Well, I think open source and governments are different. So I think the role of governments is either to create guardrails or to fund public goods. And so in a certain way you think about DARPA funding public goods. I mean you got a lot of innovation and to some degree speed, although it was a long game, you know, out of 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 innovation happens. So you know, you see Linux comes 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 an infrastructure. Firefox comes 10 years after Netscape. Wikipedia comes 10 years after Encarta. But if you still have one of those CD ROMs, you know, you get a prize. 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. So that is a truth and is continuing. Should that be dissuaded? Should that be. The answer is so what? And what do we do about it? Is the question.

Right? Yeah. And the so what is you won't get to the public goods you need in terms of keeping the market open for smaller players, in terms of researches and in terms of safety, I think you need open source and truly open source that operates in a kind of way that we all have access to and doesn't get cut off at.

But if the open source. If the open source. Yeah, yeah, please.

So I think in the, in the.

So what and how, if you would. And how that should go.

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 then corporate players, I have a little two 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 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 died, Allen Institute for.

AI, which he made, which he made the money to fund that from a monopolistic activity.

You have a tax system that supports philanthropy in America. So that's what is supposed to happen. So he really believed in OpenAI. He really believed in open source AI. And you have an amazing guy, Ali Ferrati, leading that. I think that could become the Linux or the Linux foundation of this era. And so both of those are useful players to 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 how we're going to deal with energy and AI. And to me, we really should make sure that those government dollars go to public goods. If I'm giving you huge amounts of compute as a researcher or even as a company that should produce open source at the other end of the process, if public dollars pay for it, public goods should come out the other end.

Yeah. Imad Mustak has made a statement which I really liked, which is this is infrastructure, this is fundamental. The compute is full, 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 for a nation.

I think it's. I agree with him 100% that it's infrastructure and it's not just the computer, it's the models, it's the whole stack. We did a big paper on that with a bunch of other people, including Yann Lecun was a part of it 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 and controlled by them. And you're going to have the Spanish language law, you can have the Spanish 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 actually think 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.

Where do 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 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, the 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 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 I mean it gets 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, 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 pluralistic AI. And I'm kind of, kind of buy into that 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 we make money off of real quick.

I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. The 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 10amino acid sequence that is a synolytic that kills senile 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. 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 companies and the best meritocracies are attracting the very best people with the most capital, the most compute are building the best systems and then the government becomes a user of Those systems to support its people. People in the same way that NASA didn't build Starship. Kudos to elon for Flight 5, but is going to become one of the largest users of Starship. So can we deliver on the public good with private models and private companies?

Yes. And I think 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 OpenAI 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 llama. And so I think there's a, you have to take a nuanced view of how do you get to that stuff. And our view is you want both commercial and government and non profit or open source community players all pushing towards this kind of pluralistic open, you know, and public AI option alongside everything else. Not too exclusive, you know, alongside everything else. It's not exclusive.

I, I get it and I agree. As long as again the government is not mandating but it's enabling the emergence of those resources of those open source teams and perspectives and so forth. That makes complete sense. Can I ask another question? Because I think privacy is one of the main, is a big driver for Mozilla.

Yes, absolutely.

Do you believe we actually have privacy?

Oh, it's such a tricky question. So privacy is a core in the, you know, it's something like an individual's privacy and security is sacrosanct. It doesn't quite say sacrosanct, but is in the Mozilla manifesto. It's one of the core. I know and we struggle with what is privacy now because we for us privacy was make a browser that collects no data about anybody and minimize data as much as possible. And we all know you can't make digital things now without data. I mean it's as fundamental, more fundamental than code. That's what AI is. Right. And so what is privacy in that context? And so that's a thing to work through. I do think it is, is built 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 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 Mozilla Ventures, a company who's building the, basically the open source equivalent of Apple Intelligence called Flower AI. So we think privacy, what it means, has got to evolve. It's 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 going to close the blinds or I'm going to talk a little quieter. Like 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. What hits me is I've got, I'm going to whisper it so she doesn't come alive. You know, Alexa listening. And she's listening all the time, right? I've got Siri here listening all the time. You can have an AI with a camera read my lips for from 100 meters away, you can shake my hand, grab a couple of skin cells and sequence them. So I think to some degree privacy is an illusion that we like to believe in. And the question is, it's one of.

The reasons we talk about trust and trustworthy AI as well. You can build that into the technology that the stuff is local or the camera is turned off or that whatever. And do you 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, you know, in an island, or that you trust the parties that are providing. And that's what Apple is good at. It's what Mozilla 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, 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 you 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. 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 and 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 think that's critical, you know, a critical thing to figure out for this era. The second is we figure out what are the right AI and privacy guardrails. 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 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 guardrails on that. So we've got to do a better version. And that's 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, 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 go in my aerospace roots. I remember, you know, NASA's space projects would be distributed among 30 congressional districts and companies. 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.

Yeah, for sure. The good news is that we're talking about, you know, bits.

Yes, yeah, for sure. A lot's changed from, from there. What are their policies? How do you. So the question ultimately is how do we regulate it to make sure we don't have disastrous outcomes? And how do we sneak up against AGI, whatever that is, and maybe we've passed it already, or digital superintelligence that disrupts the way of our lives so rapidly that it leaves our head spinning. 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 saw this in the debates around SB 1047, that the AI safety law that Newsom vetoed 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 amorphous fears. So it's urgent, it's important to kind of have regulation that can do that and needs to be grounded in evidence. The thing that is actually much trickier 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 wrap on a, on a conversation about what your prediction is on open source. What is your hope on where this is going to go?

Well, my prediction and my hope are the same and I hope my prediction comes true. 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, Sun. I don't know if they exist anymore, but certainly they're not the definer of 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's perspective, from a safety perspective, from an entrepreneurship perspective, from a kind 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, and that it, you know, that's something it does with intent as opposed to a kind of constraining role in trying to micromanage things.

One last aside on here, I just got back from India, which is a nation of 1.41 billion people, the largest on the planet, and a nation that I think needs AI for its survival. You cannot provide the education and healthcare. There's 100 million people that are the tax base for the nation. The rest are in some degree of poverty. And the only way you possibly provide health and education to them at scale is going to be AI on top of the Geo 5G network that's there. Then I go to Greece and I meet with some of the leadership there and they're like, help us get AI going. So for a lot of nations that are not AI centric today, that are looking and feel and know that they need AI in their nation to compete and survive and thrive. 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 healthcare and education. We have to figure out 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 Akamoglu, I never get his name right, who just won the Nobel Prize for economics, talks about machine usefulness, right? So like how do we actually make this helpful to humans, to public hands? 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 as governments should do that so that what India does helps Greece and what America does helps India and that that virtuous cycle begins. And you know, that's something where the best kind of human progress I think has come from those things all kind of adding up together.

Mark, before we sign off, where can people find you, follow you and find Mozilla foundation and how can they be involved? How can they support your work?

Easy to find Mozilla Zilla on X, Twitter, whatever you call it these days. You can find us on LinkedIn, you can find us@Benzilla.org, where we've been for 25 years. And I'm justrman on Twitter and LinkedIn. I'm kind of not in either of those places often, but you can find me there. And 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 policymaker, can you make sure that public dollars go to public goods and so on.

Amazing. Mark sermon an open source warrior to benefit humanity. That's my new brand for you.

Thank you. I'll get the T shirt printed here in New York right now.

Thank you for your work, Mark. A pleasure to meet you. Thanks for the conversation.

Likewise. Thanks for having me on, Peter.