Wednesday, July 30, 2025

An AI eternity service (instead of "sovereign" AI)

Being digitally colonized has been a serious threat to national sovereignty, but also to individual freedoms from survellance and censorship for decades. This applied to the Internet, the WWW, the Cloud and now AI. 

Whether the digital Emperors are based in the USA or China, they are there.

To avoid these sorts of risk for content, Ross Anderson proposed the eternity service which finesses the problems in (typical for Ross) an ingeneous way by structuring the infrastructure as a mix of sharing, striping, and sharding and builds in the threat of mutually assured destruction - if you are a low level engineer/computer scientist, the idea is like CDMA or Network Coding or what some colleagues re-purposed to be spread spectrum computing.

A simpler idea is more coarse grained - organisations that provide critical infrastructure (railways, power grids, water&sewerage, Internet etc) can source technology from (say) three different providers. The London Internet Neutral Exchange (LINX), which extends this to cooperative ownership as well. So undermining of one supplier's gear has a limit to damage on the service - indeed, many services operate with a headroom for coping with simple natural disasters in any case (internet and power grids also to allow for wide variance in demand/supply) so this is a natural way to do things.

Another digital version is the Certificate Transparency, which also creates a merkle tree space for (horrible word) coopetition (cooperation amongst competitors), enforced by the tamper evident (or to some extent, socio-economically tamper proof) service space, in a way a single application version of eternity.

This would apply to sourcing data, training, and models themselves + inferencing after the training.

So how about, using the state of the art multi-AI protocols to connect agents, we construct a multi-national AI substrate that serves no-one in particular, but everyone in general. Any attack (removal of an agency, pollution of data) would damage the attacker as much as everyone else. It is in everyones interest to keep the system running and running honestly.

So how to combine neural networks? (something that would also be useful during training or inference so as to share GPU or other accelerator h/w)? You'd need some sort of way to interpret multiple interleaved graphs with multiple (XORd or turbocoded) weights. This is research. Margin's too small to put it here =>

Friday, July 25, 2025

RSPAI?

 


Towards an RSPI for AI (UK) - alpha name RSPAI (short name "pai") 


The rspi was at one point going to be the BBC Nano (or model n) but ended up as rspi because ... my reaction to the 100-200$ cost of the one laptop per child project, and to the limitations thereof...was to "blow a raspberry"...

An AI, like a computer, is a general purpose machine-a purely physical tool analogy is a swiss army knife, but software on computers is tools and die - tool and die makers design, and build or repair tools. they have a bench with lathes and saws and drills and hammers and screwdrivers and boxes full of bits...

A s/w toolbench is something like unix, with subsytems (network stack, file systems, i/o in general (serial, display etc) plus SDK for development (vi, cc, add etc) and then some handy pre-made tools (regex/grep, sort, awk, sed, etc) with source and documents available so people could use them as design patterns (templates etc)

the RSPI prospered as it had 30 year pre-history  (BBC Micro, Acorn, ARM, Broadcom system on chip) and ran  Linux (descendent of bell labs et al) and had,  on the system on chip a GPU (so it could use openGL rendering / gaming s/w) and  wifi, and gpio (so it could connect to sensors and actuators and do robotics or similar

An RSPAI would also need to scale up - by being modular, and networks  (c.f. wifi and gpio above - nowadays MCP or AI2AI or similar) and  federated learning tools/platforms- the equivalent of s/w development environment but with examples (e.g. start with some huggingface pieces) and flower.ai

A network, small and large...with a way to train (NN to FL)- in fact networking at on chip, in software, and between chips/systems...

It also needs some data (kind of AI equivalent to sensor input) - this doesn't have to be _on_ the RSPAI - it needs to be where you can get it (equivalent was that 

the Pi part of the Rasperry Pi name came from the original idea that like the BBC micro that booted into basic, the RSPI would boot into python. we discarded that early on and said kids must learn the Command Line (shell) but one simple example lesson (how to write Snakes in Python) would start with how to download and install python, and then... ... ...


It could run on an RSPI easily (esp. given cheapo GPU) but what is the core tool bench for the Ai part of this RSPAI? is it just huggingface with pytorch tensorflow and all that gubbins, or is there a core that could be still general, but simpler to start off with and afford people with easy lessons - and here is a candidate lean language model that runs on a laptop, as a starter, fresh out of the Turing Institute!

(one class we ran with the RSPI had 11yr old schoolgirls withotu any teacher go from nothing to writing snakes in 1 hour from scratch) - what is the equiv to that, that lets you still also go all the way to writing a version of asteroids and control a bipedal lego robot?  or genai including stable difussion video liks this:- https://youtu.be/kG8fmSW_5wM?si=hsbBdeCUtdshNyBM

A small neural net, a regression/stats library, some causal inference graph stuff? what what what?

And who is it for? policy makers, wannabe AGI gods, defense contractors, health and environment researchers, Jane Public who who who?

Answers on a postcard please...