Building Rebel Intelligence

It’s 6 a.m. in Cambridge, UK and I’ve been lying awake since 3 a.m., the reason is just because Meta released a new product called Muse, it’s a long-running personal AI assistant inside a confidential VM with long-term memory and the ability to improve the foundational model over time. And as a huge Kobe fan, the name Muse immediately made me think of Kobe Bryant’s Muse — which probably made the whole thing even more memorable for me.

I’m not interested with the business model behind Muse too much, like how they’re going to charge the users, but very interested with the infrastructure stack they’ve built, very similar to what I have in my mind. Isolated environment for everyone, ensuring privacy and security, a growing memory for better understanding and personalization over time, and the ability to continuously improve the base model itself which loops back into the system, enhancing the overall intelligence. They even have devices integrated into the ecosystem like the AI glasses which I think it’s the new entrance for the next-generation compute platforms.

Personally, I think Meta is doing the right thing because they’re behind the frontier AI labs today, they should leverage what they have, billions of users, enormous amounts of data, and a huge ecosystem, which shapes them a good position to build better models later. I also fully believe personal AI or private AI is what everyone wants, just like the title, I want to build Rebel Intelligence. The idea is inspired by the rebel alliance in Star Wars, which fights against the oppressive Galactic Empire. It generally means two things:

1. Empowering individuals with control over their AI and data rather than being dominated by centralized tech giants.
2. Creating diverse, adaptive, and independent intelligence rather than homogenized ones.

However, from the technical perspective, what I want is still a bit different from Muse. The product in my mind is a platform for the users to manage their own computers (they could be cloud based or local devices), and people can use whatever agents, models, and tools they prefer, the ecosystem should be open. Behind them, it’s a robust infrastructure that ensures security, privacy, and continuous improvement of the AI systems.

No frustration, only excitement but also anxiety because I know this is the right path and I’m committed to seeing it through, but I’m too slow on the way today.

Wrote this down to clear my mind.