# The Future of AI: Why We Need Private, Uncensored, Permissionless AI | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 07:59
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-B_5wj6TfX8s
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_5wj6TfX8s

## Description

The current path of AI development leads to a future where a few powerful companies control this transformative technology, with the potential to become the arbiter of truth, manipulate and monetize private user data, and moderate who has access to the future of intelligence.

No entity, private or public, should have the power to monopolize or contextualize truth. Open-source, uncensored, and decentralised AI is impervious to political fancy and ideology, and offers a necessary alternative.

Speaker(s): Teana Baker-Taylor
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Real World Ethereum
Keywords: Censorship Resistance, Permissionless, Privacy

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

[Music] I hope you're having a great Devcon um it's great to be here I've got five minutes so I'm going to go really fast um bear with me so imagine a small group of companies control access to the most powerful machine learning used by billions of people worldwide they record all your AI conversations monetize your data and share it with governments on demand everything you share is attached to your identity forever they record whoops what's going on here okay sorry about that through politicized content policies their AI models are trained to coddle and redirect you when you explore topics determined to be taboo they restrict and redact information and influence your thinking based on their view of the truth does this sound like science fiction it's not it's already happening the current AI development path leads to a few powerful companies controlling the technology and becoming the Arbiter of Truth the race to dominate the consumer AI Market is on open Ai and by proxy Microsoft have a head start their partnership puts AI in the hands of 1.5 billion iPhone users the Biden administration's policies entrench AI development in the hands of a few powerful entities accelerating centralization that favors incumbents it's notable that the new newly appointed us artificial intelligence Safety and Security Board doesn't include any open- Source or decentralized AI leaders I believe AI should be optionally private our interactions with AI are personal and intimate this isn't the Polish this is not the right slide either sorry guys um this isn't the Polish social media version of us it's raw honest intellectual exploration would you share your diary online that's the level of vulnerability we expose when we use AI without privacy safeguards popular AI tools store your inputs and outputs and in many cases the platform owns the outputs you create as I mentioned earlier these inputs are attached to your identity platforms are vulnerable to hackers which continually lead to breaches does anyone remember Equifax information held by governments is equally vulnerable and the authorities making the privacy rules can't even protect their own data a recent EU Parliament data breach exposed sensitive personal data of more than 8,000 staffers your data doesn't need to be leaked to expose you to manipulation Cambridge analytica demonstrated how information can change the tech Giants sorry the information you share with tech Giants can be scraped without your consent to create campaigns designed to influence your views we need to stop volunteering our data and take control over what we share with AI I believe AI should be uncensored centralized platform forms censor according to often opaque content policies influenced by the values of those who control the platform hidden behind system prompts that are only revealed through jailbreaking user Sy are interacting with true machine intelligence a calculator programmed to do statistical inference on language in reality they're engaging with proprietary partiality within guardrails imposed by humans who have their own biases at best we receive nonsensical outputs like Gemini producing black vikings at worst human adulterated I can perpetuate the silencing of public discourse no entity public or private should monopolize or contextualize truth open access to AI is under threat Biden's AI executive order requires licenses for large models that restrict the number of parameters allowed California proposed an AI bill which includes criminalizing certain open-source AI developments the eu's AI Act is more permissive of Open Source but strict large scale but strict on large scale AI the authors the actx author himself has raised concerns that the regulatory bar has been set too high a stark example of excessive regulation backfiring France based mistol and meta both recently withheld their latest open I open source AI models from the EU preventing an entire region from accessing advancing AI politics Will play a role in AI some push for tight controls others Champion open source development the back and forth highlights that ai's future should not hint on political whims when confidence is when confidence in our political leaders is waning do we really trust them to regulate intelligence AI is being adopted rapidly a recent Harvard study found that nearly 40% of all us adults between 18 to 64 have used generative AI but unlike many but unlike money sorry uh or social media we don't need to change our existing Behavior but we do need to start as we intend to continue we must seek out and use Alternatives open source permissionless AI of all through thoughtful iteration is impervious to political fancy ideology and the antidote to gate kept curated and censored AI it's pretty easy for a developer to run a small model privately locally using ol or a similar Service open source models are rapidly becoming competitive surpassing closed Source models on many benchmarks you can find a plethora of Open Source models on hugging phase I've listed a few here for those who can't or don't want to run AI locally we created Venice a generative AI platform that embodies the principles of permissionless you can chat with some of the leading open source models too large to run locally generate images create and interact with AI characters and write and debug code all in private Venice uses decentralized infrastructure to run the platform all of your Venice activity is stored only on your browser Venice never shares your data with anyone we simply can't because we never had it in the first place use it anonymously and for free if you want greater amounts of infint or to access the API you can upgrade to Pro there's no doubt that AI would change humanity and we should engage with it but through mediums that are optionally private uncensored and permissionless thanks hello okay that's amazing this is time for question right now uh we probably have time for one question anyone have any burning question at the moment about per permission AI it's kind of an important part of the oh we go yeah uh one question uh one question uh how do you how can you in that system run lwas and run your own your own uh luras and your own uh ER how was it called uh tune tuned models can you do that since do you say you do not have the data on your servers yeah so we provide access to open source models we host those on our service we have a proxy service so when you send in your prompt to Venice it's encrypted sent bya proxy to a decentralized GPU the response is also encrypted via proxy and sent back to you on your browser so nothing persists on Venice servers we don't see your prompt we don't see the response and it's never stored uh so I cannot upload my own luras after I did my own training um you can't upload your own luras um for training but just this week hopefully later today so I might be front running myself um we are uh going live with image to image so you'll be able to upload your own images and then you'll be able to Tool them on Venice and recreate new images with a base image thank you that is our time for a question please connect with Tina more after the event you'll be will you be around I will be around and if anybody wants a Venice t-shirt please help me out because I have a backpack full of them and I don't want to carry them around anymore amazing and then we are yes another round of applause for Tina