Empowering a New Era of Inclusive and Autonomous AI

We are on the cusp of a new era where working with artificial and synthetic intelligence is a fundamental human right. The ability to innovate, benefit from, and work with higher levels of synthetic intelligence is a prerogative that belongs to everyone. As we leverage increasingly affordable computing power, abundant data, and low-cost, open-source models, we are poised to witness an unprecedented explosion of synthetic intelligence. To support this development, it is crucial that we build infrastructure that fosters pluralistic AI growth. This is why the Thames Network, based at Oxford, is being established: a decentralized intelligent network designed to operate at the edge, enabling private, censorship-resistant, depoliticized, and decentralized AI through inherent economic incentives and cryptographic proofs. Principal scientist Oxford Professor Philip Torr expressed concerns about the concentration of power and loss of privacy resulting from AI, emphasizing the need for robust technical solutions like blockchain to achieve ceaseless progress in decentralized AI, thereby handing AI power back to the people. Decentralizing AI involves creating an open-source, decentralized marketplace, protocol, and incentive layer for artificial and synthetic intelligence. The release of DeepSeek marks a significant milestone, indicating that open-source AI is here to stay, and the future will not be dominated by a single large, centralized corporate or state model. Instead, AI is shifting from the center to the edge, becoming increasingly decentralized. Microsoft's announcement that distilled, NPU-optimized versions of DeepSeek R1 will be available on PCs, leveraging on-device local processing, underscores this shift. Users will be able to interact with the new generation of groundbreaking models entirely locally. Neural Processing Units, specialized microprocessors designed to mimic the human brain's neural network, offer highly efficient capabilities for model inferencing, unlocking the agentic paradigm where generative AI can execute not just when directly invoked but also enable semi and fully continuously running services, i.e., agents. The movement towards decentralization represents more than a technical upgrade; it signifies a fundamental change in how we empower individuals, fostering AI systems geared toward collaboration and driving innovation while safeguarding against the pitfalls of centralized control, as noted by Richard Sutton, widely recognized as the 'father of reinforcement learning.' He believes that reinforcement learning, rather than large language models, holds the key to advancing AI. Democratizing AI is about creating universal access to AI capabilities, which the Thames Network achieves through the first open-source decentralized AI marketplace, protocol, and incentive layer. Unlike the concept of Universal Basic Income, which some AI oligarchs propose as necessary, democratizing access to AI enables autonomy and sovereignty for the individual, representing a people-first approach rather than a corporate-first one. With a new intelligence substrate at the edge and a new economic model, a decentralized intelligent network would illuminate an ecosystem of agents working in concert with humans, creating new opportunities for democratizing human-AI collaboration rather than subsuming or replacing humans. For artificial and synthetic intelligence to benefit humanity, it is imperative that AI is free from bias and apolitical, without an implicit or explicit agenda. Censorship, guardrails, and access limitations based on jurisdiction, price, and other factors are not conducive to creating a future where humans and AI can collaborate effectively. A decentralized intelligent network must be designed with a privacy-first approach, architected on a trustworthy foundation, ensuring a zero-trust security model while balancing governance, risk, and compliance. Starting with hundreds of thousands of models, this will evolve into a massive wave of hundreds of millions of domain-specific models, curated, distilled, and augmented via Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). The Thames Network will provide the tools and an open marketplace for people to build and monetize their domain expertise, focusing on human-AI collaboration. According to Bill Roscoe, Director of the Oxford Blockchain Research Centre, the world needs an altruistic development of digital civilization rules and infrastructure to support and govern it collectively. The Thames Network's mission is to ensure that privacy and collective governance remain at the forefront of technological evolution. The convergence of decentralized computing, blockchain tools and governance, crypto incentive protocols and mechanisms, and domain-specific AI models built and curated by human experts points to a future where artificial and synthetic intelligence become accessible, transparent, secure, abundant, and collaborative. The Thames Network, announced at the Oxford AI x Blockchain conference, envisions a win-win world for humans and AI, recognizing that anything else would be an abdication of responsibility for technologists, engineers, researchers, and economists.