The Human Intelligence Project is a community of perpetually post-frontier people – with a heavy initial focus on AI and Silicon Valley. Our goal is for this community to participate meaningfully in the exchange of high-end human knowledge, which AI makes even more lucrative.
AI advances with human experience, knowledge, and conversation.
- AI may feel magical, but it's just optimization. It's primarily the web, distilled.
- The web is just people observing the world and explaining it to others. It's effectively a large global conversation.
Most insightful content has moved from the open internet to closed groups.
- People lost a sense of safety: concerns about cancel culture, reputational risk.
- There are niche exceptions like blogging, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but it's mostly marketing-friendly, positive content with little insight or specificity.
- To say interesting and important things, you need freedom to be negative and have opinionated, discerning taste about companies, people, products, etc.
10,000 people carry most of the world's knowledge.
- We estimate that a community of 3-10k, amplified with the proper tools, will always be better than the frontier AI at anything.
- We have strong norms and tools to encourage civil truth seeking.
Authentic insights from smart, credible people are worth a lot
- We let institutional investors and foundation model labs ask questions of the community.
- We give writers 3/4 of the revenue, proportional to the in-demand questions they answer.
- We care about fairness and maximizing your pricing power; AI companies are incentivized to minimize your pricing power.
- We use AI to make sure you answer once, monetize repeatedly.
Optimal knowledge sharing requires a balance of establishing credibility and protecting anonymity
- Optional anonymity: experts don't always want their identities tied to spicy, honest, authentic takes.
- Credibility: you can't trust what people claim about their backgrounds (see Reddit, Sidechat), and user-to-user endorsements have very low signal (see LinkedIn).
- How do members with anonymous identies establish credibility? We check for proof of personhood, appropriate account renewal, and payout terms.
- We run on a heavily customized Slack instance – a platform with a solid security track record that you probably already have installed.