What happened to the crypto revolution? Well, we fell into a crypto winter and never really got out of it, but the crypto craze has changed the way we think about financial progress. spurred on.
At our recent Imagination in Action event in April, we heard from Vana's Anna Kazlauskas. She was obsessed with central banking during her time at MIT, and she admits that she had a rig set up in her dorm room to mine Ethereum.
“We were using technology to transfer power to people,” she said of the general ethos of using cryptocurrencies in this way. “How do we decentralize so that we can create this decentralized central bank?”
Kazlauskas is now part of Vana's efforts, and democratizing data is part of its mission statement.
“Your data is completely yours,” she said, describing a personal server architecture that works like an API that allows users to give permission to flow their data to other environments.
She laid out three important criteria for these systems: 1. Self-hosted, 2. Portable, and 3. Monetizable.
In a live demo, she showed how to program a service that reminds you to meditate daily with your own voice.
She acknowledged that this type of technology needs to be carefully protected.
“It would be really scary if someone could take a clone of my voice and use it for whatever they want,” she said. “That’s why it’s so important to own your AI and your data so you can create things like this.”
Mr. Kazlauskas spoke about the larger context of these uncertain times, where some of what we have come to understand as an ongoing reality is being challenged.
“We are in a time of great economic change,” she said. “People are really worried: Is AI going to take my job? What’s happening is that a lot of big tech companies are pulling data from all over the internet, and a lot of it is It's probably your data, training an AI model that can do your job and replace you…This is a really bad deal for society.”
In contrast, she talked about a new Reddit data aggregation initiative that puts users in control of and monetizes their information.
This could help reform a system that currently seems unfair, she said.
“Today, open source AI is kind of eating the leftovers of big tech,” she said, suggesting that in another scenario, high-profile community-backed efforts would have more impact. Did.
“If we can collectiveize in the right way, people can create even better models,” she said.
So what are we going to do with the data? Perhaps these questions will be at the core of what happens with AI in our society. Many of us believe that we simply need to put guardrails around our data. If not, something like this: Vana is leading the way and I think more people will be thinking about this in the future. We will discuss in detail many of the things that were revealed at the IIA event, but this is one of the core topics that should never be ignored in any company or any other setting.