The post Open AI might kill us. Closed AI might enslave us. Choose your future. appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

There’s a familiar discomfort creeping in again, something I felt in the early 2010s as I watched social media’s promises of connection and community unravel into mass manipulation. Facebook and propaganda bots were the first dominoes. Cambridge Analytica, Brexit, global elections, it all felt like a betrayal of the internet’s original dream. Now, in the 2020s, I’m watching the same forces circle something even more volatile: artificial superintelligence. This time, the stakes are terminal. Before we dive in, I need to be clear: when I say ‘open’ vs ‘closed’ AI, I mean open-sourced AI, which is free and open to every citizen of Earth, vs. closed-sourced AI, which is controlled and trained by corporate entities. The company, OpenAI, makes the comparison complex given that it has closed-sourced AI models (with a plan to release an open-source version in the future) but is disputably not a corporate entity. That said, OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, declared in January that his team is “now confident we know how to build AGI” and is already shifting its focus toward full-blown superintelligence. [AGI is artificial general intelligence (AI that can do anything humans can), and superintelligent AI refers to an artificial intelligence that surpasses the combined intellectual capabilities of humanity, excelling across all domains of thought and problem-solving.] Another person focusing on frontier AI, Elon Musk, speaking during an April 2024 livestream, predicted that AI “will probably be smarter than any one human around the end of [2025].” The engineers charting the course are now talking in months, not decades, a signal that the fuse is burning fast. At the heart of the debate is a tension I feel deep in my gut, between two values I hold with conviction: decentralization and survival. On one side is the open-source ethos. The idea that no…

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Filed under: News - @ June 19, 2025 11:29 am