The Cooperation Economy as a Path to Collectively Protable and Safer AGI

Fuente: Zenodo
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autore principale: Williams, Andy E
Natura: Recurso digital
Pubblicazione: Zenodo 2026
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866901082457767936
author Williams, Andy E
author_facet Williams, Andy E
contents <p>The frontier-AI race increasingly rewards control of bottlenecks—compute, power, cloud distribution, ecosystem lock-in, and proprietary feedback loops. This paper argues that the race is not merely bad for aggregate welfare. It is a gamble in which most participants face existential outcomes: structural irrelevance, absorption, or dependence on whoever locks up the decisive layers. A cooperation economy offers a different expected-value proposition for each firm. Under cooperation, network effects from shared infrastructure, contributor diversity, and interoperable standards can reliably deliver more value to each participant than the expected return of a race with at most one or two winners. More importantly, the cooperative infrastructure includes a self-compounding market-formation mechanism that can discover and synthesize entirely new markets from coordination failures—markets that are structurally inaccessible to enclosed systems because no single actor can bear the coordination cost. This may represent the single largest untapped opportunity in the AI industry today. Functional specifications for the entire cooperative product stack, including the market-formation engine, have already been developed. The practical implication is immediate: frontier labs should compete aggressively at the product layer while helping build a cooperative foundation layer.</p>
format Recurso digital
id zenodo_https___doi_org_10_5281_zenodo_19359929
institution Zenodo
language
publishDate 2026
publisher Zenodo
record_format zenodo
spellingShingle The Cooperation Economy as a Path to Collectively Protable and Safer AGI
Williams, Andy E
<p>The frontier-AI race increasingly rewards control of bottlenecks—compute, power, cloud distribution, ecosystem lock-in, and proprietary feedback loops. This paper argues that the race is not merely bad for aggregate welfare. It is a gamble in which most participants face existential outcomes: structural irrelevance, absorption, or dependence on whoever locks up the decisive layers. A cooperation economy offers a different expected-value proposition for each firm. Under cooperation, network effects from shared infrastructure, contributor diversity, and interoperable standards can reliably deliver more value to each participant than the expected return of a race with at most one or two winners. More importantly, the cooperative infrastructure includes a self-compounding market-formation mechanism that can discover and synthesize entirely new markets from coordination failures—markets that are structurally inaccessible to enclosed systems because no single actor can bear the coordination cost. This may represent the single largest untapped opportunity in the AI industry today. Functional specifications for the entire cooperative product stack, including the market-formation engine, have already been developed. The practical implication is immediate: frontier labs should compete aggressively at the product layer while helping build a cooperative foundation layer.</p>
title The Cooperation Economy as a Path to Collectively Protable and Safer AGI
url https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19359929