This generation of technology will either put real capability into ordinary hands or concentrate it in a few. The architecture of a devoted guide and a manipulation engine is the same architecture, and nothing in the code decides which one it becomes. Who it answers to decides.
Every company that ended up somewhere ugly started out meaning well. Good intentions are not a structure, and they do not survive a change of ownership.
An ordinary corporation owes its directors one duty, which is to the money. A public benefit corporation owes a second duty, to a public benefit its own charter names. Ours names three.
Capable artificial intelligence available to people generally, at prices that do not reserve it for the wealthy. If it only reaches the people who already have every other advantage, it has made the gap wider rather than smaller.
The capability goes to the people who use it rather than concentrating in us or in any other provider, including what the systems learn about them. You can run it without us, and take it with you if you go.
Built to increase your own judgment rather than to maximize your engagement. A tool you need less over time is a success. A tool you cannot put down is a different product entirely.
Alongside the purpose, three covenants bind the company in the certificate itself: we will not sell, rent, or license your personal information or what the system remembers about you; we will not adopt time spent, session frequency, or engagement as objectives of the business; and every person can export what the system holds about them, and delete it permanently. We publish the values these systems act under as well, because a value nobody outside the company can read is not a commitment, it is a mood. Read the constitution.
A charter can be amended by whoever controls the company later. So the purpose is paired with an independent trust holding a class of stock that carries no economics at all, and exactly one thing: the right to refuse.
It can also refuse a change that would strip away its own ability to refuse, which is the lock that makes the other three mean anything.
That narrowness is the whole design. A body that can veto anything ends up vetoing nothing, because nobody can work with it.
The trustees hold no economics, so there is nothing to buy. That is the point. You cannot purchase a person's agreement when their agreement was never for sale.
Each Maison is private and runs on its owner's hardware. But when one of them solves a problem well, the lesson can travel to all the others while the information behind it stays exactly where it was.
Every network you have joined asked for your data in exchange for the benefits of everyone else's. That trade felt fair because there did not seem to be another one available.
There is. A lesson is not the same object as the thing that taught it, and only one of the two has to move.
A compass, not a cage.