Artificial intelligence promises to greatly improve the quality of life of every human on Earth. Already, AI assistants are democratizing access to education, high-quality medical advice, and psychotherapy. Text-to-image models like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have unleashed the creativity of the masses, empowering people to create stunning artwork at little or no cost. Tools like GitHub Copilot and GPT-4 are making it easier than ever to create software, automating the most tedious parts of programming and enabling beginners to get started coding more quickly.

Today’s AI tools are just the beginning. AI is improving quickly because we’re teaching it to imitate the vast amount of human-generated text, images, and video available on the Internet— it does not need to learn from scratch. Since modern AI is powered by human imitation, we should not think of it as an alien force that might take over the world if given the chance. Rather, it is an extension of our culture, a crystallization of human knowledge and values. The last decade has shown that AI is much easier to control than many had feared. Today’s brain-inspired neural networks inherit human common sense, and their behavior can be molded to our preferences with simple, powerful algorithms. It’s no longer a question of how to control AI at all, but rather who will control it.

As optimists, we believe that AI is a tool for human empowerment, and that most people are fundamentally good. We strive for a future in which AI is distributed broadly and equitably, where each person is empowered by AIs working for them, under their own control. To this end, we support the open-source AI community, and we oppose attempts to centralize AI research in the hands of a small number of corporations in the name of “safety.” Centralization is likely to increase economic inequality and harm civil liberties, while doing little to prevent determined wrongdoers. By developing AI in the open, we’ll be able to better understand the ways in which AI can be misused and develop effective defense mechanisms.

Optimists are excited about the new technologies that AI will enable in the coming decades. But we also strongly believe that these technologies should be thoroughly optional. No one should feel forced to change their way of life due to social pressure, competition, or legal mandate.

In short, AI optimists are working for a free and fair future. For thousands of years, humans have built tools to extend our reach, enabling us to do things we couldn’t do before. Today, we are imbuing our tools with the gift of intelligence, unlocking a new age of creativity and innovation.