Summary: We're starting an AI lab called GAIL (Ghana Artificial Intelligence Lab). We'll do fundamental research and build products. Our mission is to double Ghana's GDP. How? We plan to build autonomous AIs as valuable as the rest of the Ghanaian economy combined.

Intelligence is the rarest and most consequential resource in the universe. Human intelligence has led to radical improvements in the human condition, improvements that would shock even the wealthiest and most powerful from a few centuries ago. Humanity now has a shot at creating unlimited amounts of this rare resource in a silicon medium without the limitations of a frail human body. We could soon have intelligent non-human agents that work day and night to discover new physics, find elusive drugs and cures, and solve other problems humans care about, without need for sleep nor food and without the occasional lapse in judgment. The stakes are pretty high!

It's thus not surprising that AI labs around the world are investing heavily in the technology. Most of this effort has gone into creating very useful but passive AIs that lie dormant until they receive some form of human input/prompt. They then yield some output that one hopes fulfills the request in the input/prompt. We're convinced this approach – the creation of "subservient" AIs that exist to do what is asked of them – is directionally wrong if the goal is to have AIs that can rapidly accelerate human progress. To see why, notice that the most consequential outputs of human minds throughout history did not come from executing explicit instructions or demands from others. No doubt such impactful humans consumed knowledge that was discovered and compiled by others. But the sort of art, theories and inventions that have moved the dial on human progress seem to have originated "internally" (even if inspired by external observations) and usually in a form markedly different from anything occupying contemporary thought and hence not what anyone would've even known to ask for.

This presents a chance to mine the AI opportunity where others aren't. Can we build autonomous AIs that are immensely useful to the world to the tune of doubling Ghana's GDP? We think so. By "autonomous" we mean AIs that receive no explicit human inputs/prompts to create, think new ideas, or build things humans find useful. We mean AIs that learn from human data but otherwise run autonomously, 24/7, just generating outputs that humans may or may not find useful after the fact. It may seem counterintuitive that such an AI would be useful in any way, much less economically, but further thought reveals incredible products one could build with such AIs. (We have concrete plans to build three products with our first autonomous AI. This includes an API that developers can use to build cool stuff we haven't even thought of.)

As we research and build these autonomous AIs, we may discover ways to massively improve existing AI products that deviate from our "autonomous AI" approach. We will be flexible enough to take such opportunities. What we won't be flexible on is our mission, for two reasons: 1) the country badly needs it and 2) technological discontinuities of the AI magnitude are so rare that it just makes sense to take a swing at an ambitious goal with them.

If you believe in our mission and would like to bet on us, we’ve created a “GAIL” utility token on the Polygon blockchain and made 10% of the token supply available for purchase with USDT or USDC, priced at 1 USDC = 10,000 GAIL (see [1] for details about the token and [2] for an important note). Please email token@gailgh.com if you’d like to purchase a portion. The plan is to raise a small amount with this 10%, enough to build and deploy our first autonomous AI. The remaining 90% is locked in a vesting wallet for a period of 5 years, with a linear vesting curve [3].

We’ll use the GAIL token to incentivize developers (and even fund new startups) to build with our APIs. The token will essentially be the currency of the GAIL ecosystem [4]. Crucially, we’ll use it as a means to give token holders, developers building with our APIs, and the general Ghanaian populace some exposure to the value of the company, a key part of fulfilling our mission.

We're building a small team of excellent ML engineers that find this mission energizing. Join us if that's you or refer us to the best engineer you know.