Co-director @ilan-strauss.bsky.social spoke on protocols as market shaping instruments, along with the folk actually designing them at @presidiosf.bsky.social It was a unique panel. Discussion covered AI memory, nostr, MCP, Buzz, & more You can listen to it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bb0...

The Importance of Open Protocols | Open Source AI Summit

YouTube video by Presidio Bitcoin

youtube.com

Co-director @IlanStrauss will moderate a panel on "How Open Source Shapes AI Markets: limits, enablers, and open protocols" Register: free to attend NYU, Monday September 21 as part of an all day workshop on *open source AI* led by @creativecommons.bsky.social creativecommons.org/event/open-u...

We’re co-hosting OPEN @ UNGA 81 with @creativecommons.bsky.social in NYC on Sept. 21. At 1:30pm, we’re moderating a panel on: Can open source make AI markets less centralized? With Duane O’Brien, Amanda Casari, Madiha Zahrah Choksi & Ben Moskowitz Register: creativecommons.org/event/open-u...

OPEN @ UNGA 81: A Conversation on Collaboration - Creative Commons

On the margins of UNGA 81, leading civil society and digital rights organizations will examine balancing aspirations for digital sovereignty.

creativecommons.org

Bigger isn’t always better. LLMs are vastly more general than chess engines like Stockfish -- but at a chessboard the specialized system wins easily. What does chess, LoRA, and small models tell us about the economics of specialized AI? Read our latest: asimovaddendum.substack.com/p/when-small...

When Smaller Models Win

Chess, LoRA, and the case for specialized AI

asimovaddendum.substack.com

Join us Sept. 21 at NYU for a @creativecommons.bsky.social commons -led discussion on open source and AI “sovereignty.” Can open source provide a decentralized alternative to today’s AI stack-- and if not, what would it take? Register: creativecommons.org/event/open-u...

The Architecture of Participation: Progress at Bellagio and globally

AI Sovereignty, the Architecture of Participation, and our Rockefeller-sponsored Bellagio Convening

asimovaddendum.substack.com

Co-director @ilan-strauss.bsky.social on @bbcnewsunofficial.bsky.social commenting on Amazon training its AI models on Twitch creator data The challenge & opportunity, Ilan argues, is to use AI to grow the monetizable ecosystem for all, to benefit creators rather than compete with them Video 1 / 2

What if Google isn’t losing the AI race -- but choosing a different race? @timoreilly.bsky.social argues that Google may be making a “Westinghouse bet”: prioritizing the infrastructure and diffusion of AI over winning the frontier-model contest. Maybe the real AI race isn’t about... 1/2

Google’s Westinghouse Bet

SemiAnalysis thinks the DeepMind shakeup means Google is losing the AI race. It might be that Google is choosing to run a different race.

asimovaddendum.substack.com

AI safety research needs post-deployment visibility We analyzed 1,178 safety & reliability papers drawn from 9,439 generative-AI papers. Just 4% of frontier-lab research addressed high-risk deployment areas, addiction, medical, etc Our new open-access paper in @IEEEAccess: doi.org/10.1109/ACCE...

AI models are developing distinct personalities. As users & models adapt to each other, the fit becomes part of the product -- and the moat. @timoreilly.bsky.social on model culture, schismogenesis & why portable memory is essential to freedom of choice asimovaddendum.substack.com/p/differenti...

Differentiation and personality in AI models

Thoughts on model "culture" as a kind of lock-in

asimovaddendum.substack.com

Open protocols like MCP pull monolithic AI stacks apart into competitive markets MCP's real unlock is composition across apps, not one server per client New from Adam Jones (@AnthropicAI) & Tadas Antanavicius (@pulsemcp) on how MCP shape's production asimovaddendum.substack.com/p/open-proto...

Co-director @ilan-strauss.bsky.social asks: "Where does intelligence reside? Where does it live? ...the artificial intelligence found in LLMs is inert & centralized in the models’ weights. This is a very different type of intelligence to that exhibited by markets, which is...." 1/2

Our co-director @timoreilly.bsky.social in the @theeconomistevents.bsky.social argues that "The merchants are becoming princes". Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate, Tim argues. Read more here: www.economist.com/by-invitatio...

Where does intelligence reside? @ilan-strauss.bsky.social proposes that AI, as inert & centralized, is reliant on market-based intelligence for federated learning & updating Protocols advance market specialization & can bridge these intelligences: asimovaddendum.substack.com/p/where-does...

Where Does Intelligence Reside?

Why AI needs markets — and how specialized production / open protocols can enable this.

asimovaddendum.substack.com

"Jeff Ding's diffusion theory of the role of technology in great-power competition also applies to AI adoption, and it suggests that companies obsessed with the frontier might be optimizing for the wrong thing." Check out new #Radar piece by our @timoreilly.bsky.social to learn more: bit.ly/4bu9KNo

Ordinary Engineers, Not Heroic Inventors

Jeff Ding's diffusion theory of the role of technology in great-power competition also applies to AI adoption, and it suggests that companies obsessed with the frontier might be optimizing for the wro...

bit.ly

We are pleased to announce that AI Disclosures Project co-director @ilan-strauss.bsky.social has joined the @msftresearch.bsky.social AI Economy Institute’s third cohort of Senior Fellows. He will investigate the macroeconomic drivers and constraints on technological innovation.

New cohort of AI Economy Institute Fellows to examine frontier AI firms and the transformation of work

Introducing the 2026 AI Economy Institute Fellows, a global cohort advancing research on AI’s impact on work, firms, and economies.

blogs.microsoft.com

🦜 The Architecture of Participation 👥 New in our newsletter: - Our progress toward an architecture of participation for AI markets at Bellagio & globally - @timoreilly.bsky.social writes on why open models, protocols, harnesses & portable memory are now core to AI sovereignty👇

1/ 🧵 What are the missing mechanisms needed to build a future human+AI economy that is participatory, generative, & distributed? Last month @timoreilly.bsky.social brought 20 leading economists, protocol builders, & AI system experts to the @rockefellerfdn.bsky.social Bellagio Center to work on it

You can't fix a discovery problem with a better agent. The problem sits in the protocol. The gap comes from architecture. A2A inherited email's design: one-to-one, address-required, no public record of messages. Discovery was left out by design. Read more on our alternatives👇

Agents Need a Public Square

Why better agent discovery is needed – and why broadcasting may be the answer

asimovaddendum.substack.com

Our co-director @timoreilly.bsky.social has a wonderful video on @BigThink about enshittification of digital markets, architectures of participation, the industrial revolution, and creating the sort of market society that we want: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrQu... A must watch 📽️

AI hype is starting to sound like religion | Tim O'Reilly

YouTube video by Leadership Lessons | Big Think+

youtube.com

Should agentic communication look more like e-mail or like social media, with "broadcasting"? The notion that agents will communicate directly with a single agent (A2A) ignores the problem of matching & discoverey Agents need a public square, argues Sruly Rosenblat Link🔗👇

What does communication look like in digital networks? Sruly Rosenblat argues that A2A protocol for agentic communication is restrictive because it views everything as one-to-one communication. Instead, we need "broadcasting", like on social media. Working nostr protocol at end. Link below 👇

We blame LLMs when they're unreliable. But the model is not always the problem, the API metered access is. A sharp new piece from Sruly Rosenblat @AssimovsAddendum breaks down how API design decisions by a few big companies cap reliability for the entire developer ecosystem. 🧵

Markets are built on trust. But it's pretty hard to trust AI agents. How to create monetizable agentic markets then? Read our most recent substack post: "Dangerously Skip Permissions" 👇 ...on how market-shaping protocols could make agents safer

We reanalyzed @anthropic.com's Economic Index and found it doesn't show what they say it does: GDP per capita does not predict AI adoption. Moreover, it doesn't imply increasing global inequality, like the @financialtimes.com says. Read @ilan-strauss.bsky.social's full analysis below 👇

The @financialtimes.com headline implied AI adoption patterns portend future divergence in living standards. But Anthropic’s report that they supposedly cover doesn't show this. I reanalyzed their public data @ai-disclosures.bsky.social: the GDP → usage relationship is weak 👇

MCP -- a key open standard in AI application markets -- now lives with the Linux Foundation. It underpins a lot of interoperability in the market. But open standards go 'bad' all the time. And it's often not about the standard, per se. Read more in our latest Asimov Addendum below👇

With Anthropic reportedly gearing up for an IPO as early as 2026, @timoreilly.bsky.social @ilan-strauss.bsky.social @isobelmoure wrote a “Christmas wishlist” for what its S-1 should disclose based on existing SEC standards. Key is non-price operating metrics which encode business objectives 👇 Read

Our Anthropic IPO Christmas Wishlist

Tell Us What You’re Optimizing For

asimovaddendum.substack.com

With Anthropic reportedly gearing up for an IPO as early as 2026, @ai-disclosures.bsky.social wrote a “Christmas wishlist” for what its S-1 should actually disclose based on existing SEC standards: – burn rate – circular revenue / partnership deals – what algorithms optimize for 👇 Read more

Anthropic’s new “advanced tool use” shows where the real action is: AI power sits in protocols like MCP, not just models -- search, programmatic tools, shared memory. www.anthropic.com/engineering/... See our previous work: “Protocols and Power” + “Read–Write–Act” below 👇

Protocols and Power

If "context" is king, we need to ensure it remains fluid and accessible by third-party developers

asimovaddendum.substack.com

Are LLM's the best that they will ever be? A guest post on Asimov Addendum by @rufusrock.bsky.social "The technology might continue to get better, but that doesn’t mean that the user experience will. Why? Primarily because no one knows how to make LLMs profitable." Read more below👇