1. Preamble.
We have a simple short term goal of creating a great product and your loyal AI companion you will love to use and collaborate with. The one that will not substitute you but augment you multiplying your productivity and making your life easier and happier by saving time on what reality matters.
While complementary to our short term goal, in the long run we are building David with the ambitious goal of achieving Artificial General Intelligence. Being small and insignificant underdog, we do not believe that this is possible only for tech giants and multi billion dollar government and corporate AI labs beefed up with tens and hundreds of thousands GPUs.
With the world increasingly divided between democracies and tyrannies, we believe that AGI will become an Oppenheimer moment for human civilization. AGI will become the single most important invention in the history of human civilization and ultimately will affect the course of the history. And depending on who controls it, democracies or tyrannies, AGI will pave the way for Mankind to the new era of exploration, progress and prosperity or become a grim dystopia for the world.
Hence our mission is straightforward - to increase odds of success for good guys in this wild race. And David One is our first step in this hell-bent effort. In porsuit of our goal we adhere to two core principles: safety and speed.
2. Importance of being safe.
Artificial General Intelligence potentially can bring unpredictable consequences. On one hand, human-level AI and large-scale automation will revolutionize whole industries, bringing a paradigm shift to the global economy and introducing the challenge to adapt to the new changes in the fastest and safest way. On another hand, AI is already weaponized by cyber criminals and governments and this trend will only multiply with the advance of AGI making malicious use of AI even more dangerous. We understand such risks and their importance and are committed to alleviate them while achieving AGI.
3. Importance of being first.
At the same time we understand the inevitability of technological progress as a whole and AGI in particular. At the moment, first and foremost this world is about human vs human and not AI vs human. That is why we understand that many actors are not committed to safety and are only committed to the speed of development to achieve AGI as fast as possible by any means necessary. And some of these players are authoritarian regimes we mentioned in the Preamble. They will not stop and they will not bother with safety to achieve global dominance. So we (technological companies of the Free World) should commit as much to speed as we commit to safety.
We cannot afford to achieve AGI in an unsafe and dangerous way as much as we cannot afford to be the second. Because if we fail to be first there will be no second place in this race. The same way if we are the first but not able to handle AGI in a safe way, we can also be the last. That is why for safety, preservation and development of the human race it's vitally important to be the first and make it safely.
4. Government role
While it's important for governments to have regulation of AI in place it is even more important to implement smarter regulation and strategies. Regulation should not suffocate AI companies, especially early stage startups, with compliance and legal burden. Over emphasizing safety by pressing AI companies with over regulation can cause the opposite effect. It can not only reduce the competitive edge of Western countries in AI but can also drive technologies and talent to other places with less regulation in AI where, ironically, technologies can end up in the wrong hands of foreign governments and malicious players. That is why it's extremely important for Western governments to not drive AI companies away by over regulating the industry. They should remember that they cannot regulate all AI companies over the world equally.