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DARE TO FOUND
Most generations inherit their world. Some must build it anew.
Today, we’re launching Cosmos Ventures to back philosopher-builders founding institutions for the AI age.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the American founding demanded new institutions for a new kind of society. Benjamin Franklin identified what that world would need and built what was missing. He believed self-government required educated citizens, so he pioneered subscription libraries. A free people required a free press, so he seeded newspapers. Neighbors had to carry one another's risks, so he established mutual insurance.
AI is creating the biggest opening for institution building since the American founding.
Our world developed around the assumption that intelligence was bound to human beings. Ideas had human authors, and consequential decisions had accountable individuals behind them. If employers needed analysis or creativity, they had to hire people. AI is breaking that bond.
Some assume AI is a normal technology our institutions will absorb as they absorbed the internet and the smartphone. Others insist superintelligence leaves little worth building outside the frontier labs. Both are counsels of passivity at a moment that calls for founders. Many of the institutions we will need have yet to be built. We have to decide what we value most and how to secure it. These are questions no machine can answer for us.
Founders answer them with what they build. Tomorrow’s most important companies will set new norms that others organize around, becoming foundational institutions of the AI age.
Institutions encode theories of how we should live together. A new school is a claim about how children should be formed and what is worth teaching them. A personal agent is a theory of which decisions we can delegate and which we must make ourselves. A new assurance regime is a theory of what to trust and how to demonstrate trustworthiness.
Enduring institutions won’t be built by simply following user feedback and iterating. Their founders must answer normative questions about what kind of society they’re building toward. They must be . We are here to back them.
Immanuel Kant gave the Enlightenment its motto: Sapere aude. Dare to know.
The AI age demands another.
Condere aude. Dare to found.