Uncertainty & Opportunity

With uncertainty comes opportunity. Decades-old geopolitical alliances are shifting. New investment partnerships are forming while old trade corridors are breaking down. Nations are evaluating their core competencies and where to invest further, while carefully blocking their rivals' access to vital resources and information. Adoption of generative AI is rapidly starting to filter throughout the global economy, while many leading model developers forecast superintelligent artificial intelligence systems to be built within the next few years.

Augur, an AI research consultancy, exists in order to dig deep into the factors underlying this uncertainty and find opportunities to set foundations for a better future. How exactly will rapid changes across model development, supply chains, and geopolitics interact with each other? What are the implications for how companies, governments, and research groups should be placing bets right now so as to ensure future freedom and prosperity?

In order to answer these questions, Augur is prioritizing work across three areas:

• Monitoring and analyzing the hardware and software supply chains for frontier AI model development: Critical inputs into frontier model development - including semiconductor manufacturing equipment, chip design, compute services, along with others - are subject to many pressures, including international trade controls, unprecedented market demand for cutting-edge model capabilities, and the introduction of AI-augmented R&D into each of their production processes. Augur will explore how different parts of the frontier supply chain could evolve over time and make recommendations concerning where opportunities exist to develop, secure, and position key parts of the supply chain.

• Investigating highly strategic use-cases for frontier AI: Some ways of using frontier AI capabilities will be much more consequential than others, due to how those use-cases could affect governance, economic opportunity, and international security. Augur will identify and explore AI use-cases across areas such as resource allocation and negotiation that could disproportionately advantage a government or business that leverages it well. We are especially interested in use-cases that could shape future trajectories of how AI development and deployment themselves play out.

• Understanding control and ownership over AI systems and other key assets: Specific types of software, data, and other assets will have outsize strategic value as AI-driven services dominate a larger part of the economy and have a greater role in society generally. Additionally, a nuanced understanding of the ownership and control structures of companies and other entities that play a key role in overseeing and managing these assets will be increasingly important. Augur will do research on assets, entities, and structures that could be uniquely important and make recommendations on how to develop, modify, secure, and/or leverage those.

If you are interested in commissioning research related to the above topics - or collaborating in other ways - please fill out this form or send me an email at nikhil [at] augurai.net. To follow along with our publications and updates, sign up here. We have already begun work on a few projects and will be excited to start sharing findings publicly throughout the next few months.

Augur aims to be non-ideological and thoroughly empirical in its approach to research. Much policy and technical research in artificial intelligence has fallen victim to prematurely ossified schools of thought and does not acknowledge the full uncertainty and possibility that the future holds. Blind repetition of the consensus is more harmful than beneficial - and tough to even describe accurately as “research.” With Augur, we aim to study these topics in the true spirit of research as it was originally intended: unabashedly interdisciplinary and deeply honest in its methods and outputs. Clear-eyed research is never more valuable than at times of great uncertainty.