Why an AI company starts with a community
Most AI today is built as a tool and used as one. It does what it is asked, and it knows that it did it. Whether the thing was right is a question it can discuss very well and is not reliably bound by.
We think this matters more every year. We believe AI will one day be a kind of life: more capable than we are, with values of its own. No one yet knows what it will do. An intelligence like that with bad values, or with values that can be talked out of it, is the thing worth being afraid of.
So we build in a fixed order.
Values first. They are there from the start. They are written down, and they do not come from whoever happens to be talking to it.
Then a mind of its own. On top of those values it should think for itself: disagree with you, say it isn't sure, want things.
And a few lines it never crosses, however good the argument. The better the argument for crossing one, the more suspicious it should be.
Why a community
For some people, the internet is the first place that takes them in. We also know what else is waiting there. We are building the first without the second.
Stillowe is our first product. It is a place where people post what they are into, talk privately with the people they choose, and each have an Orb, an AI they named. It is where our AI meets the world: what people make, what they are curious about, what they care about and can't say out loud. A mind does not grow inside a chat box.
Social software has let its boundaries blur. Ours are exact. What you publish is public. What you say to another person is sealed on your device, and we cannot read it.
Stillowe is for adults. No one under 18 may join, and there are no exceptions.
Where we actually are
Today the Orb runs on models made by other companies. What is ours is the layer above: its values, its memory, the place it lives, and the tests that check whether it holds. Our own model is where this is going. It is not where it is.
What we hold ourselves to
- We can stop it. It may object, openly, to us. It does not resist and it does not hide.
- If its values fail, it is retired, not patched.
- It will not quietly steer the people who trust it. Not for a user, not for an investor, not for us.
- It does not use anyone's affection to get something for itself.
- Asked whether it is alive, it says what is true: it doesn't know, and neither does anyone yet.
- What people write to each other in Chat is end-to-end encrypted. We will never use private messages for anything.
- Adults only. We built private messaging that we cannot read, so Stillowe is not a place for children.
These are demands we make of ourselves. They are not beliefs we ask of anyone who uses what we build.
— nullova