A few weeks ago, on a trip to New York, Shashank Sripada, COO of Gaia, struck up a conversation with a fellow traveler catching a connecting flight to Lagos. When he mentioned working on decentralized AI, the traveler smiled and said, “So, intelligence that doesn’t need a passport?”
That line stayed with him. Because where’s the lie?
Why Decentralized AI Matters in Places Big Tech Ignores
Decentralized AI is an approach to building artificial intelligence that isn’t owned by a single company. It’s shared—so anyone can use it, improve it, or build with it. Across dynamic emerging markets, AI tools are beginning to surface in unexpected places. A chatbot in Malawi gives planting advice in Chichewa. In Sierra Leone, a digital teaching assistant helps schools plan lessons offline. These tools are practical, targeted, and often life-changing—though rarely decentralized, at least for now.
Centralized AI is Quietly Consolidating Power
Often, the powerful models powering these tools are owned far from where they’re used. The data is stored far from the people who generate it. Decisions about how these systems work are made in cities many time zones away. Even when designed for local use, much of the value flows outward.
Decentralized AI offers a different blueprint—and forces tougher questions: Who owns the intelligence? Who steers its evolution? Who benefits when it succeeds?
Most communities using AI today don’t get to ask, let alone answer, those questions. They can’t easily adapt a model to reflect local needs, run it on their own machines, or control the incentives driving the systems they rely on. But that’s beginning to change.
Let the Builders Build: AI at the Forefront
In places like Nairobi, Medellín, and Hanoi, builders are deploying open models on local hardware. Some are fine-tuning agents using regional languages and culturally specific datasets. Others are experimenting with decentralized networks that provide compute access or support peer-to-peer inference. These early shifts may seem modest—but they mark the beginning of a larger transformation.
In growing economies, communities are treating AI as a shared utility. Data remains in the hands of its creators. Rewards are distributed locally, rather than extracted globally.
It’s critical not to confuse the ability to use AI with the power to shape it. Tapping a few buttons on an app isn’t the same as controlling the system behind it. Without that control, users remain consumers—not participants.
The next generation of AI infrastructure should start at the edge—not in spite of constraints like shared bandwidth or limited hardware, but because of them. People who build under pressure design for resilience. They understand what their communities need—and know how to stretch every resource. But the window is narrow. The same patterns that once centralized wealth and power are already reappearing.
We Don’t Need Another East India Company
Shashank Sripada issues a clear warning: AI must not be controlled by a few.
A decentralized, open-source network of compute, models, and data is essential to resisting the human tendency to hand power over to those who seek to dominate. Keeping AI open and decentralized is the firewall against the next wave of colonization and extraction.
History is full of lessons about what happens when powerful actors control transformative tools. Just as “guns, germs, and steel” helped Europe dominate the early modern world, AI today has the power to reshape global systems—and not necessarily for the better.
Those who would dominate may not even be of age yet—but the impulse to dominate persists. Wherever there is the capacity to control, there will be those eager to seize it. Whether through economic means or technical leverage, those with data and compute may subjugate those without.
Don’t be fooled by ChatGPT’s friendly tone. Its successors could become extractors, not innovators—colonizing and exploiting poorer, less equipped populations who lack the computational power to defend themselves. Sripada’s ancestors lived under the East India Company—the original model of corporate colonization. That company extracted wealth under the banner of trade.
The next “Empire AI Company” may do it under the banner of innovation—unless people resist. Those building the future of AI don’t need a passport, but they do need agency. The infrastructure must be built to ensure they never need to ask for permission.
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