AI Superintelligence Race Accelerates With 2025 Deadline

There is a growing unease about the potential consequences of artificial superintelligence, reminiscent of the early 2010s when social media's promises of connection and community unraveled into mass manipulation. Now, in the 2020s, similar forces are circling around artificial superintelligence, with even higher stakes.

The debate centers around the distinction between open-sourced AI, which is free and accessible to everyone, and closed-sourced AI, controlled and trained by corporate entities. OpenAI, a company that has both closed-sourced AI models and plans for an open-source version, adds complexity to this comparison. The company's chief executive, Sam Altman, declared in January that his team is confident in their ability to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) and is already shifting focus toward full-blown superintelligence.

Elon Musk, another prominent figure in frontier AI, predicted during an April 2024 livestream that AI will likely surpass human intelligence by the end of 2025. The engineers involved are now discussing timelines in months rather than decades, indicating that the development of superintelligent AI is accelerating rapidly.

The core of the debate lies in the tension between decentralization and survival. On one hand, the open-source ethos advocates for knowledge to be free and intelligence to be a commons, not controlled by any single entity. On the other hand, open access to superintelligent systems could lead to catastrophic outcomes if misused by malicious actors.

If superintelligent AI is created, whoever interacts with it will shape its development. This could lead to a variety of outcomes, from planetary repair and universal education to engineered pandemics and recursive propaganda loops. The power that comes with superintelligent AI, without collective wisdom, could be historically catastrophic.

Conversely, locking this technology behind corporate firewalls and regulatory silos leads to a different dystopia. In this scenario, cognition becomes proprietary, shaped by profit incentives rather than human need. Governments could use closed AGI for surveillance, and citizens could be fed state-approved hallucinations.

Both open and closed systems, if left unchecked, could lead to conflict. A decentralized AGI trained by peace activists could conflict with a nationalistic AGI fed on isolationist doctrine or a corporate AGI tuned to maximize quarterly returns. These systems would not simply disagree; they would conflict in code, trade, and kinetic space.

Decentralization of power works when there is a shared substrate of trust, alignment, and rules that cannot be rewritten on a whim. Bitcoin worked because it decentralized scarcity and truth simultaneously. However, superintelligence maps to cognition, intent, and ethics, for which there is no consensus protocol.

To navigate this challenge, open systems must be built with constraints. These systems should have cryptographic guardrails, altruism baked into the weights, and non-negotiable moral architecture. A sandbox that allows for evolution without annihilation is necessary. Multi-agent ecosystems where intelligences argue and negotiate, like a parliament of minds, are preferable to a singular god-entity that bends the world to one agenda.

Governance, not top-down control, is essential. A cryptographically auditable framework for how intelligence interacts with the world, akin to an AI Geneva Convention, is needed. This framework should be a layer of protocol-level accountability, not a law.

The future of AI is already whispering, asking who gets to shape the mind of the next intelligence. If the answer is "everyone," then it must be done ethically, structurally, and with a survivable plan. The path forward must thread the needle between decentralization and destruction, not by slowing down, but by designing wisely and together.