BERLIN - Many proponents (such as I) who continually push to democratize artificial intelligence (AI) have celebrated the acceleration of open source (OS) collaboratives that have contributed to their OS publication of their large transformer models. For a long time, many of these models were only accessible for Big Tech, but now far more people have access to them.

Amidst all the excitement about the democratization of AI, I recently came across a tweet from a well-respected researcher, Carissa Véliz. She is the author of a must-read book, Privacy is Power, and her tweet made me write this newsletter. In her tweet, she expressed her concerns and referred to an article published in Slate.

The argument that bad actors can manipulate OS code is one that regularly pops up in conversations and debates on OS. This argument is as old as OS itself; one could even argue that it dates back to when Gutenberg invented the printing press. Printing decentralized gatekeepers, which transformed religion, science, and politics, and provided more people with access to knowledge, deception, and power. It weakened authority and hierarchy, putting groups against one another, and it disrupted and liberated. The printing press deserves credit for democracy and the Enlightenment, though at the same time it also deserves some of the blame for chaos and slaughter. Some of those responsible for the slaughter were indeed horrible actors, but nevertheless, the need to eradicate ignorance and provide people with access to information and understanding evolved into a driving force behind uprisings that overthrew feudal regimes.

Top nine OS AI mythbusters

Myth 1: Bad actors can manipulate the code

This