The pursuit of the intelligence bazaar
It’s been 25 years since Cathedral and the Bazaar was first published. In this masterpiece, Eric S. Raymond examines the struggle between top-down and bottom-up design approaches between what he calls “The Cathedral model”, in which source code is available with each software release, but code developed between releases is restricted to an exclusive group of software developers and the “The Bazaar model”, in which the code is developed over the Internet in view of the public. Two and a half decades later, it remains relevant in the world of AI.
In a recent position paper, presented as an Oral at ICML 2024, Google Deepmind both defined “open-endedness” and outlined some promising research directions. For them, open-endedness refers to a system’s ability to “continuously generate artifacts that are both novel and learnable to an observer”.
But alongside this paper comes the “State of the AI” report which argues that the LLM future will more closely resemble Windows than Linux or Apache.
At Reppo, we are disappointed with the author’s shortsightedness on this topic. While they might be right in saying that LLMs might resemble windows, the real question at hand is — Are LLMs the future and are LLMs even close to resembling intelligence? As you might have guessed, we don’t think so.
We know as a fact that non-LLM foundational models are generally more versatile and require less data compared to LLMs and there are many approaches to building foundation models.
At Reppo, we vehemently disagree that intelligence will live and progress in cathedrals and our team is committed to building the intelligence bazaar.
Reppo’s approach to this bazaar is a network of networks to address gaps in human reasoning and machine intelligence by incubating and incentivizing domain-specific inference engines, called Reppo Intelligence Pods. Each pod has individual ownership and monetization pillars, and pod owners govern these pillars.
Just like in a bazaar, we believe diversity defies synonymity in how intelligence is produced. The economies of scale approach has time and again been disrupted by either institutions that care about competitive economies or by uprisings from those whose labours’ fruits were unequally distributed, to the extreme.
As knowledge workers, we often forget than on a daily basis, we are the ones producing the cement and bricks using which the cathedral is being built. We even provide feedback with the hopes that it advances humanity but when the day comes for the crowning of the king, we will all be in shock that the entry to cathedral isn’t free, even if you helped build it and we all would wish we had helped build the bazaar.
At Reppo.xyz, we are building the foundations of the intelligence bazaar.
