VALIANT
LABS
At Valiant Labs, we build and support the full stack of open source AI, including models and datasets.
You can find our flagship Shining Valiant 2 series and our other work on Hugging Face.
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Open source AI must win or the world is going to be a bad place to live in. We've already seen the results of closed-source domination at our current level of AI technology: centralization, censorship, and anti-consumer dark patterns to take your money. New premium AI services are priced beyond individual purchasing power, widening the advantage for large enterprise businesses against everyone else. The profit model for closed-source AI companies going forward is to sell these services as replacements for human employees. To justify their increasing valuations, they will need to replace millions of human workers as quickly as they can.
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We've also seen what the presence of giant tech companies has done to the internet itself: a wild, creative sea of individual websites replaced with a small handful of horribly unpleasant monoliths with deeply manipulative algorithms, directly making your life worse every time you use them to make money for some of the very worst people that stand upon the Earth. If this happens again with AI, the outcome will be worse: the majority of the economy, the workforce, and the public commons under the control of the same people who have brought you the social media age, now motivated by an even larger pile of money to make.
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There is another way: as with the original vision for the internet, the AI age must be built in public, from the bottom up, by all of us. Open source software projects do not bow to established hierarchies: they are networked, multi-threaded collaborations of contributors, where the work you do and make available to everyone is the thing that matters. AI can actually be for us: a personally constructed assistant that lives on your machine, cares about what you want, and works as a team with you to navigate the unfriendly world we live in.
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This is the only thing we're fighting for - that the world ahead is one that we all get to actually participate in. We're going to need your help. We'll be updating this page soon with more details, but if you're interested reach out today to hello@valiantlabs.ca
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thanks for reading,