On a recent episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast, Elon Musk highlighted a challenge facing all the big tech companies fighting for supremacy in the AI space. You’re only as good as the data you have access to, and increasingly, ‘you run out pretty quickly’.
Speaking on the topic of his AI initiative xAI and their Grok LLM, Musk shed light on the limitations of the data currently available:
‘It’s actually humbling to see how little data humans have actually been able to accumulate… discounting spam and repetitive stuff, it’s not a huge number.’
Beyond the user-generated data being used to train LLMs, the next big step in AI is the ability to navigate and interact with the real world: spatial data. In this area, the sensors used to capture data dictate the type of data that is available. Compared to user-generated text and still images, sophisticated sensors with continuous real-time high-definition video and LIDAR arrays capture data orders of magnitude more than previously available.
This is where Musk believes that xAI has an advantage:
With Tesla and the real-time video coming from several million cars, ultimately, tens of millions of cars. With Optimus, there might be hundreds of millions of Optimus robots, maybe billions, learning a tremendous amount from the real world.
The map of the world is growing, but the sensors are currently mounted on cars or in public spaces. Beyond our roads and public spaces is where humanity spends most of its time, in our places of business and in our homes. Tens of millions of Teslas are obviously an invaluable source of data, but ultimately, many valuable areas are still terra incognita.
Optimus, as a humanoid robot with improved utility and mobility, will be everywhere. Able to perform a multitude of tasks in homes, offices, factories and public spaces, it is no wonder that Musk thinks that;
Optimus is going to be the biggest source of data...
There is no doubt that the data that a billion of these spatial data gatherers will be able to gather invaluable and almost incalculable amounts of data. If any company is able to deploy this many sensors and have them infiltrate every aspect of daily life, then they would undoubtedly have a massive advantage over every other AI company.
However, this improved data has darker implications: it is only useful if it is used. Musk seems pretty candid about this in this interview: they're planning to spy on you.
Whereas most of us seem to have made peace with most of the content we share online being scraped, collated, and fed to AI for the purpose of training, the idea of these spatial data gatherers being invited into our homes and offices is less palatable.
Until now, the implied and sometimes explicit agreement between the tech giants and their users has been that we get something of utility for free and, in return, provide our data to them to use or sell as they see fit. The implied spying has generally been seen as a palatable trade, whether that be through more targeted ads or data being used to train LLMs or improve algorithms. And the invasion of privacy has often been made more palatable through measures such as anonymizing data and grouping users together.
However useful Optimus and Tesla cars are, the new spatial data dynamic, with real-time feeds of ‘our’ reality being piped into a data center in Memphis to fuel xAI’s drive to become the dominant AI, should give us pause.
A sensor like Optimus with an ability to not only share continuous video, audio and spatial data of our most intimate spaces but also to move freely within them is something entirely new. Facebook never had the ability to open our bedroom drawers. Beyond the privacy implications, there is the question of whether this is a fair trade. Is the old model of trading data for utility an adequate model for this transaction?
Ultimately, reality doesn’t just scale; in this case, reality will be defined by the choices we make. Do we hand over this treasure trove of spatial data in return for utility, as we have for so much of the internet's recent history, essentially handing some big tech company an unassailable lead in the AI race? Or do we try to find an alternative way that balances privacy with utility?
This is where the decentralization movement and DePINs (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks) like The Posemesh offer an alternative: a way for users to own their own data, trade utility with other users on the network, and preserve privacy.
To learn more about The Posemesh, read the protocol’s whitepaper.
Auki is building the posemesh, a decentralized machine perception network for the next 100 billion people, devices and AI on Earth and beyond. The posemesh is an external and collaborative sense of space that machines and AI can use to understand the physical world.
Our mission is to improve civilization’s intercognitive capacity; our ability to think, experience and solve problems together with each other and AI. The greatest way to extend human reach is to collaborate with others. We are building consciousness-expanding technology to reduce the friction of communication and bridge minds.
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The Posemesh is an open-source protocol that powers a decentralized, blockchain-based spatial computing network.
The Posemesh is designed for a future where spatial computing is both collaborative and privacy-preserving. It limits any organization's surveillance capabilities and encourages sovereign ownership of private maps of personal and public spaces.
The decentralization also offers a competitive advantage, especially in shared spatial computing sessions, AR for example, where low latency is crucial. The Posemesh is the next step in the decentralization movement, responding as an antidote to the growing power of big tech.
The Posemesh has tasked Auki Labs with developing the software infrastructure of the posemesh.
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