The AI Wars Update - 9/13/24 Edition

David Waring

David Waring

— 5 min read
The AI Wars Update - 9/13/24 Edition

There is a war being fought for our digital brains.

To win, we need to make it easy for everyone to own, control, and benefit from their own digital brain.

So we can stop using corporate owned digital brains like ChatGPT.

And start using our own digital brain instead. 

Several months ago I began focusing full time on winning the war for our digital brains.

My current focus is on the first two steps of our 8 step battle plan:

Step 1: Start calling them digital brains

The current jargon around AI such as LLM’s, RAG, Embeddings, etc makes it hard for non technical people to understand what’s happening.

And if people don’t know what’s happening…

Then they are going to give all their knowledge and information away to Big Tech owned digital brains.

And it will be Big Tech that gains the majority of the benefits from the AI revolution.

Instead of us. 

That’s why step 1 is to start using terminology that anyone can understand. 

When I explain that AI systems like ChatGPT are really digital brains, people immediately understand the concept. 

And once they do, they can easily grasp why they wouldn’t want a company to own their digital brain.

For all the same reasons they wouldn’t want a company to own their physical brain.

I now use this explanation whenever I speak to anyone in person about AI. 

It always allows them to understand the importance of having an alternative to systems like ChatGPT. 

I’ve also started publishing content to help people understand this.

Over the last several months I have:

My primary goals for Q4 are to:

  • Up my publishing frequency to once a week on DaveWaring.com, and daily on DigitalBrainBase.com and my social channels. 
  • Gain my first 100 true fans across my primary marketing channels.  I’ll define a true fan as someone that likes, comments, shares or otherwise interacts with my content at least once a week.
  • Have 5 active DigitalBrainBase.com community members by EOQ. I define active as members that are posting at least 5 times a week in the forum. 
  • Hire and onboard a community advocate to help create content for and build out the DigitalBrainBase.com community. If you or anyone else you know would be interested in this position you can read more here.

Step 2: Provide a Simple Alternative to Big Tech Digital Brains


Using our own digital brains must be as simple as using big tech digital brains like ChatGPT.

And our digital brains need to be just as powerful as systems like ChatGPT out of the box.

I’ve spent the last several months researching different systems, and even working with developers to build one of my own.

After extensive research I believe that Open WebUI is the most promising system for creating, controlling, and benefiting from our own digital brains.

The reason is that Open WebUI allows me to own and control the 4 primary components of my digital brain:

The 4 Primary Components of a Digital Brain:

  1. Retrieval: Open WebUI provides an interface for input and retrieval into your digital brain, and the storage/memory components. One that you own and control, not some big tech company.
  2. Storage: Open WebUI comes with storage for our personal data that you also own and control.
  3. Intelligence: You can use any publicly available AI for the intelligence layer of your Open WebUI powered digital brain. Including open source models that you can download, own, and control.
  4. Hosting: You can host your Open WebUI powered digital brain on your own computer, a private cloud hosting provider, or anywhere else you would like.

And you can do all this for free:

Open WebUI currently lags behind corporate-owned digital brains like ChatGPT in some areas.

However it’s a relatively new system, and already has an active developer community that is improving the system at an impressive rate.

I believe they have the right strategy and community ethos to catch up and eventually surpass corporate owned digital brains like ChatGPT.

For these reasons I have stopped developing my own system.

And am now focusing my time, attention, and money on helping the Open WebUI community succeed.

Since discovering Open WebUI I have:

  1. Focused my developer Beck on helping me fully understand the Open WebUI system and all the features and functionality.
  2. Used Open WebUI to setup my own digital brain on my laptop that can be run 100% offline. 
  3. Used Open WebUI to setup a second instance of my digital brain that is hosted like a website. This allows me to access it anywhere I have an internet connection. (I refer to this as a hybrid digital brain setup). 
  4. Transitioned the majority of my daily AI use from the corporate owned digital brain ChatGPT to my own digital brain running on the Open WebUI system.
  5. Become an Enterprise sponsor of the Open WebUI community, which provides funding to the Open WebUI community, monthly calls with Open WebUI’s founder, and promotional opportunities for my websites. 

My Q4 goals for Open WebUI involvement:

  • Create 10 high impact use cases for my digital brain built on Open WebUI. I'm starting to keep track of potential use cases here. Let me know if you have ideas. I'll be sharing anything I build with the DigitalBrainBase.com community.
  • Have all questions being asked about and issues being raised across the internet by Open WebUI users addressed by our new DigitalBrainBase.com community evangelist that I am hiring. 
  • Add developer resources to focus on building out a hosted solution for Open WebUI that allows people to easily get up and running with a digital brain that they own and control. I’d also like this developer to work on bug resolution issues to free Tim and other top Open WebUI developers up to focus on higher level issues, features, and functionality. 

I’d love it if you’d join me on this journey. 

You can do so by joining my free email newsletter where I post my thoughts on AI, Crypto, and The Future. I’ll be publishing here once a week going forward.

And if you are ready to start building your own digital brain, I’d love it if you’d join me at DigitalBrainBase.com and share your thoughts, questions, concerns, and progress with the community. 

Thanks for reading!

Dave

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