An open letter from a #DeepSeek engineer has gone viral.
It begins as a reflection on what it means to write code in the age of increasingly capable #AI agents. But it ends with something closer to an alarm: What happens if one of the most powerful technologies ever built comes to be controlled by a handful of elites?
This, the engineer wrote, is not the future he is building toward. It should not be one the rest of us accept, either.
Just last weekend, several of the industry's leading #US firms, including #OpenAI and #Anthropic, called for a slowdown in the AI race. But coming from the front-runners, those calls ring hollow. The world is not safer when those already in the lead decide how fast everyone else is allowed to run.
As the competition intensifies, the #AGI, or artificial general intelligence, has become a "holy grail" for a small group of deep-pocketed companies, each convinced that whoever gets there first will call the shots. Much of that race, meanwhile, is still unfolding inside black boxes.
That should trouble us.
If artificial intelligence is going to remake how we work, how we learn and how societies function, then access to it cannot be the privilege of a few, however well-intentioned they claim to be.
Seen in this light, open source is not merely a technical preference. It is a check on concentrated power. It offers one of the clearest ways to prevent AI from becoming, in effect, a technology controlled by a small number of privileged actors.
