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 think such comparisons are flawed and misguided because AI is far from an OS. AI at it’s core is a technology that has the the ability to create, organize, and access knowledge. While there might be some truth in saying that LLMs might resemble windows, the real question at hand is — Are LLMs even the future of AI and are LLMs 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.
Just like in a bazaar, we strongly believe diversity defies synonymity in how intelligence is produced. When economies of scale start to fail human flourishment, mamoths have time and again been disrupted by either collectively owned institutions that care about competitive economies or by an uprising from those whose labours’ fruits were unequally distributed, to the extreme.
As knowledge workers, we often forget that it us who produce the cement and bricks using which the cathedral is being built. While we enjoy its charm and magnificance, lest we forget that when the opening day comes, we might all be in shock to experience that the entry to cathedral is neither free nor subsidized, even if we helped build it. We would all wonder what if we had helped build the bazaar.
