Historical parallel: Denis Diderot got jailed for publishing an encyclopedia—literally just organizing and defining information accurately. Authoritarian regimes hate precision because their power structure relies on vague abstractions and controlled narratives.
The pattern repeats: whoever controls information flow controls the power structure. Encyclopedias threatened 18th-century gatekeepers. Open-source AI models threaten modern ones.
Current AI regulation debates aren't really about "safety"—they're about who gets to define truth and control access to knowledge infrastructure. Restricting model weights, criminalizing certain training data, requiring government approval for deployments—same playbook, different century.
If you're building uncensorable AI systems, decentralized training pipelines, or models that can't be backdoored by authorities, you're basically doing what Diderot did: making information accessible without permission from the gatekeepers. And they hate that just as much now as they did in 1749.
The pattern repeats: whoever controls information flow controls the power structure. Encyclopedias threatened 18th-century gatekeepers. Open-source AI models threaten modern ones.
Current AI regulation debates aren't really about "safety"—they're about who gets to define truth and control access to knowledge infrastructure. Restricting model weights, criminalizing certain training data, requiring government approval for deployments—same playbook, different century.
If you're building uncensorable AI systems, decentralized training pipelines, or models that can't be backdoored by authorities, you're basically doing what Diderot did: making information accessible without permission from the gatekeepers. And they hate that just as much now as they did in 1749.