This week, Kimi K2.5 dropped out of China. An open-source model matching frontier lab models on meaningful intelligence benchmarks. GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.5 territory.

A few months ago, it was revealed that 20-30% of new companies applying to a16z are already running open source models.

Open-source AI is clearly on the rise... But not for the reasons many people think.

I’m not betting on open source because frontier open source will necessarily beat frontier closed source in raw intelligence (AGI/ASI, etc). It is possible this happens long term, but clearly OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are going to be large players for some time.

I’m betting on it because I believe a future where private, open-source AI is accesssible to everyone, is objectively a better future...

AND because the market shift to open source is already occuring in a big way, in large part due to the convergence of these three trends.**

1) AI Is Moving Beyond the Chat App

Despite what most consumers think, AI is not synonomous with a chat interface. At its core, AI is a data transformation tool. Chat is one application.

As we expand into deeper enterprise and agentic use cases, most AI will live behind the scenes. Agentic workflows. Multi-model pipelines. AI agents spinning up their own AI agents, orchestrating swarms of small and medium models (perhaps fine-tuned on your proprietary data).

For many existing business use cases, it already makes more sense to use pipelines of tuned smaller models than to route every query to GPT-5.2 or Opus 4.5. Why pay 100x the price for tasks that don’t require frontier models?

This trend accelerates as smaller models and new AI frameworks become more powerful. The agentic era doesn’t need one massive brain. It needs coordinated networks of specialized intelligence.

The diaspora of open-source models of all sizes, combined with strategic fine tuning for your end use cases, are better suited to serve this growing demand for applications beyond AI chat.

2) Open-Source Unlocks Better Unit Economics

This might be the most important trend: the bottom line increasingly favors AI ownership vs rental. This means dedicated compute.

For any company of significant size (& AI usage volume), running open source models on dedicated compute usually costs dramatically less than paying per API call to rent someone elses model. You’re paying for hosting with effectively unlimited requests, bounded only by your GPU bandwidth, versus paying per token, forever.

Combine this with the first trend: most in-the-weeds use cases don’t need the biggest, most expensive models. Nor should you be using them. You’re overpaying for capabilities you don’t need while building dependency on infrastructure you don’t control.

The bottom line always wins. And the bottom line is shifting.

3) Privacy Becomes Existential

In July 2025, Sam Altman said something remarkable on a podcast:

“If you talk to ChatGPT about your most sensitive stuff and there’s a lawsuit, we could be required to produce that.”

He called it “very screwed up.” ChatGPT conversations have no legal privilege, unlike communications with lawyers, doctors, or therapists.

This isn’t hypothetical. OpenAI is currently fighting court orders in the New York Times lawsuit requiring retention of user chats. Data you thought disappeared when you closed the browser tab may still exist in systems that can be subpoenaed.

Here’s where it gets serious: as AI becomes embedded throughout operations, every company becomes a dual organism. The core business that delivers products and services, and a model factory that trains AI to support (and eventually run) those operations.

When your AI manages your core IP, that AI becomes your competitive moat.

If you don’t have verifiable control over who accesses your models and your data, you’re at the mercy of whoever you’re trusting not to steal, sell, mismanage, or reproduce your core IP.

Look at Web 2.0. Microsoft, Facebook, Google built empires on user data and copying business models. As AI becomes a multi-trillion dollar race with ever-higher stakes, the pressure intensifies. Corporate promises are thin walls.

Open source gives you the opportunity to own your intelligence, not rent it.

On Alignment

AI alignment is impossible at the individual or company level without end-to-end privacy. You cannot align AI to your values if someone else controls the infrastructure. You cannot build genuine trust with systems that share your data with third parties.

AI sovereignty isn’t just strategic advantage. It’s the foundation of any AI future worth building.

If you are interested in deeper philosophical layer here --> check out my Cognitive Sovereignty Manifesto.

The Perfect Storm

The agentic era demands distributed, specialized models, not monolithic API calls. The unit economics at scale increasingly punish renting AI vs deploying on dedicated compute. And privacy becomes non-negotiable as AI becomes your competitive moat.

As these trends converge, the demand for open-source AI will increase, and the players that make it extremely easy to build on a secure, open-source stack will win.

This is what Covenant Labs is betting on.

We’re building the infrastructure layer for encrypted, open source AI. We’ve already open sourced an early version of Conduit

, our developer framework with a custom runtime optimized for smaller models.

Soon we’re releasing our secure compute cloud: a managed service that lets even lightly technical users deploy models and build powerful agentic pipelines on dedicated, secure compute.

If you, and/or your firm wants to participate in this shift and capture the benefits of secure, open-source AI --> please don’t hesitate to reach out :)

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**To be clear, I’m not claiming there won’t still be large, centralized AI models, but that open source will represent a significant chunk (if not the majority) of all AI usage.

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This principle cuts to the heart of what's actually happening around us. Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming an extension of our minds, yet the infrastructure powering that intelligence remains controlled by entities whose incentives fundamentally diverge from human flourishing. We are witnessing the outsourcing of cognitive sovereignty to systems designed to extract value from the very thoughts they help us create.

Technology has always both reflected and shaped the culture around it, but AI represents something categorically different. These systems are not just tools—they are embodiments of their creators' values, biases, and worldviews, trained on the sum total of human knowledge and expression. As they become intimate partners in our thinking processes, they will shape us in ways far more profound than we can possibly imagine, molding not just our behaviors but the very patterns through which we perceive reality itself.

The battle for human autonomy in the 21st century will be fought not on physical terrain, but within the invisible infrastructure that increasingly mediates our thinking, creativity, and decision-making processes.

The question isn't whether this battle is coming—it's whether we'll recognize it's already begun. "Own your models, own your mind" isn't just a rallying cry; it's a recognition that cognitive sovereignty has become the essential foundation for human agency in an AI-mediated world.

When Did We Sell Our Digital Souls?

You already know something is wrong. That creeping feeling when you search for something private and see ads for it everywhere. The uncanny way your phone seems to listen to conversations. The algorithmic echo chambers that somehow know exactly how to keep you scrolling, clicking, buying, engaging—even when you don't want to.

We traded our digital souls for convenience, one "Accept Terms" click at a time.

Each terms of service agreement we blindly accepted became a contract that bound us into systems we didn't fully understand—signing away our psychological safety, our digital sovereignty, our cognitive autonomy in a Faustian bargain dressed up as technological progress.

Social media platforms turned our relationships into data points. Search engines turned our curiosities into profiles. E-commerce sites turned our desires into behavioral predictions. We became products masquerading as users, all while telling ourselves we were choosing efficiency.

That was just the warm-up act. AI is the main event.

AI Is An Extension of Your Mind

Artificial intelligence isn't just processing your data anymore—it's thinking with you. AI systems are becoming cognitive partners that know your writing style, your decision-making patterns, your creative blind spots, and your deepest questions better than your closest friends.

Every prompt you send reveals the architecture of your thinking. Every conversation creates detailed maps of your consciousness. Every interaction trains these systems not just on what you know, but on how you think.

And right now, all of that intimate cognitive collaboration is happening on someone else's servers, under someone else's rules, for someone else's benefit.

The same companies that turned your social connections into surveillance capitalism now want to become the infrastructure for your thoughts. They're not just harvesting what you've already created—they're positioning themselves as essential partners in everything you'll create next.

The New Corporate Feudalism

This isn't just a personal privacy issue—it's an existential threat to innovation itself. In the AI era, intellectual property has become the ultimate moat. Your ideas, your thinking patterns, your creative processes—these are the only real competitive advantages left when product building and replication happen at the speed of code.

We're living in an "ask for forgiveness, not permission" world when it comes to AI and data.

OpenAI alone faces multiple lawsuits for potentially training on stolen intellectual property. But the deeper issue isn't individual malice—it's systemic inevitability. When you're building technology as powerful as nuclear weapons, you inevitably become subject to the gravitational pull of the world's most powerful forces: governments demanding backdoors, trillions of investment dollars with strings attached, and political actors hoping to leverage your systems for their own ends.

Most people working in AI are probably good people with good intentions. But we're kidding ourselves if we believe this level of concentrated power will somehow remain immune to corruption.

The pressures are structural, not personal—and no amount of corporate ethics training can override the fundamental dynamics at play when this much power concentrates in so few hands.

When your company's most sensitive intellectual property flows through AI systems controlled by entities with documented histories of data misuse and potential conflicts of interest, you're not just risking competitive advantage—you're gambling with your organization's entire future.

The potential for abuse isn't a paranoid scenario; it's an inevitable outcome when power this concentrated lacks accountability.

Reclaiming the Cypherpunk Vision

There was a time when the internet promised a level of digital freedom we can barely even imagine today. It was built in part by Cypherpunk visionaries who believed technology could liberate humans rather than merely extract value from them. That vision still burns bright in those working toward what some call a "solarpunk" future—a world where technology, humanity, and nature exist in regenerative harmony.

This isn't naive optimism. It's an achievable vision where AI becomes a tool for unlocking human potential rather than monetizing, extracting, and enslaving it. Where privacy isn't a luxury but a foundational right built into the architecture of our digital systems. Where the cognitive enhancement that AI offers serves human flourishing rather than corporate surveillance.

But to do this, we need "hard trust"—systems that are trustworthy by mathematical design, not corporate promises. Hard trust doesn't ask you to believe in good intentions. It doesn't rely on privacy policies that change overnight. Hard trust is built into the cryptography itself—systems designed so that even their creators cannot misuse them if they tried.

The cryptocurrency community learned this lesson early: "Not your keys, not your crypto." If someone else controls the private keys to your Bitcoin, you don't really own that Bitcoin—you own an IOU that can be revoked at any time. The same principle applies to artificial intelligence: not your models, not your mind.

If someone else controls the AI systems you depend on for thinking, creating, and deciding, you don't really own your cognitive processes—you're renting them under terms that can change without notice.

A New Covenant

The word "covenant" carries a deep archetypal and biblical connotation. Unlike a contract that binds you downward (often with terms you may not fully understand), a covenant is a promise that looks upward—toward a better possible future, toward what could be rather than what currently is.

This is what we have the opportunity to create: a new covenant between humans and AI, between humanity and technology itself. Not the dystopian cyberpunk reality where privacy, psychological safety, and ownership of our own minds become relics of the past, but a foundation for genuine cognitive sovereignty in a world where everyone has access to advanced artificial intelligence.

This covenant offers us the chance to prove, with code rather than promises, that we can own our minds and secure our data. That we can build systems with hard trust built into their very DNA.

Introducing the Covenant Protocol

To build a solarpunk future—where technology, humanity, and nature exist in regenerative harmony—we need lunarpunk technology as its foundation. The light and the dark are both necessary. While solarpunk envisions the flourishing future we're building toward, lunarpunk focuses on the privacy, decentralization, and anonymity required to protect the individuals and organizations actually building that future.

This is the concept of the walled garden that my studio Ascendance was founded around: trust, yes, but also verify.

“Walk in love, as Christ loved us,” yes, but also “put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground.”

This vision led me to co-found Covenant—my latest company to emerge from the Ascendance ecosystem. Our mission is to build the privacy layer for Aligned AI.

We've built a completely novel mechanism to run fully end-to-end encrypted AI, meaning that users and companies can have total ownership of their models and data, never exposing unencrypted information at any point in the process—addressing one of the main weaknesses of current AI infrastructure.

The system operates on hard trust principles, proving with code that not even Covenant or our cloud providers can access your data, even if we wanted to.

This isn't just privacy tech—it's foundational AI infrastructure for cognitive sovereignty. When you control your AI models and protect your data, you're not dependent on the policy changes, business pivots, or ideological shifts of centralized platforms.

You're operating from true digital autonomy.

The Moment of Truth

We stand at a crossroads that will determine whether AI amplifies human potential or consolidates power in the hands of a few massive corporations.

The technology exists to build AI systems that genuinely serve users rather than extract value from them. The question is whether we'll demand those systems or accept convenient servitude.

This isn't about rejecting AI—it's about ensuring that as these tools become extensions of our minds, they remain aligned with our deepest values and highest aspirations. It's about choosing a future where thinking itself remains free, where creativity stays sovereign, where the most powerful cognitive tools serve human flourishing rather than corporate extraction.

The solution starts with code, but it's sustained by a covenant—the promise we make to each other that technology can still serve humanity's highest potential.

Your choice is simple: Will you rent your intelligence from Big Tech, or will you own it?

Your model. Your data. Your mind.

If we don’t build around these principles now, we may not have the opportunity again.

It’s time for us all to choose Cognitive Sovereignty.

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Covenant is currently working with select enterprise clients and preparing to launch a closed beta. Check out covenantprotocol.com for more information on our AI privacy tech.

Reach out to will@ascendance.one if you are interested in using our ai privacy tech, investing in our ecosystem, or working with us to build aligned AI models and applications for your brand.

I believe that The Body of Christ has a critical role to play in the development of AI.

This is a vision that has been developing in my heart for some time.

In the words that follow, I will attempt to convince you that aligning AI with the Body of Christ is the best strategy (and perhaps the only viable strategy) for ensuring AI is aligned with human potential.

To begin our conversation, there are two things you must first understand about the nature of AI:

1. AI is a reflection of its creators

“Artificial Intelligence” is a mirror. It was created by humans, designed to replicate human intelligence, and trained on internet scale human data. It is becoming a reflection of us in ways we cannot yet fully understand. Therefore…

2. Using AI will change us in ways we cannot yet fathom

"We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us," as Marshal McLuhan and his contemporaries observed. This is true for any advanced technology, but perhaps exponentially more so for AI, given point #1.

Humans created AI in our image.

Now, AI has begun to shape its creators.

To understand just how much it will shape us, let's look back at another powerful technology that has shaped the world in a matter of decades: Social Media.

The social media era has clearly shown us how digital technologies can change human psychology and shape our perception of reality. If you grew up, like I did, during the advent of the smartphone, you know that we as humans are very different than were in 2001. Social media, for better or worse, has become an extension of how we see and experience the world.

AI will also become an extension of ourselves (and already has for many), but its effects will be far more intimate, pervasive, and profoundly transformative to our experience and to the further evolution of humanity.

AI will quite literally become an extension of our mind.

To say it differently, the degree to which AI shapes us will be far greater than any technology we have ever created before.

AND the more we shape it, the more it shapes us.

We've entered a recursive loop where the AI “programs” we build today will literally “program” the reality of tomorrow. Each interaction subtly reshapes our understanding, influences our decisions, and transforms how we think and operate in the world.

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The Genie Will Not Go Back In the Bottle

Before we continue down this train of thought, there are two more things you must understand:

3. AI is the ultimate accelerator

What used to take years, now takes months. What used to take decades now takes years. What used to take a millennium might happen in a week. We can’t assume that old heuristics of time are still valid. The only thing we can reasonably assume is this: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed” - William Gibson.

The time-space we inhabit has already begun to fragment.

4. AI is a black box

We can’t actually see how AI “thinks.” We have mathematical models of neural networks, but we don’t actually know why AI models make the decisions that lead to their outputs. Realistically, we can compare our understanding of what’s going on in an AI model to our understanding of what's going on in a human brain.

We have good math and science to help us understand what might be happening. We know if we train an AI model, or a human brain in a certain way we can drastically affect how it develops and matures. BUT, just like a human brain, we don’t know exactly why AI models come to their conclusions. Thus we ought to approach them holistically.

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When we released the AI Genie from the bottle, we set a series of events in motion which are no longer under our control

This doesn’t mean good engineering isn’t an important factor, but it's a downstream effect, not a driving force. The engineering will happen whether any of us likes it, or not. We cannot stop its development, or use. Even if we wanted to, we can’t slow down for economic and geopolitical reasons (what if we stop, and China doesn’t, and they get to superintelligence first?.. etc).

AI as a social, cultural and spiritual force is now akin to nature itself. You cannot “engineer” nature. You can either go to war with nature by attempting to beat it into submission, or you can co-create with nature by developing a harmonious relationship to it.

Think about what happened when we tried to scale industrial agriculture through increasingly toxic pesticides, or when Big Pharma companies tried to reduce human health to a set of symptoms and patentable drugs, or when Bill Gates started releasing vaccinated mosquitoes into a live ecosystem (even a child could likely tell him this sounds like a bad idea).

When we become so prideful as to believe we can engineer every aspect of the world around us, or “play God” so to speak, we always manifest a monstrous shadow of what we originally intended.

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The Problem of AI Alignment

A big conversation right now in the highest levels of tech and politics is “AI Safety and Alignment,” or “to what degree can we align advanced AI systems with human interests.” I would describe “AI Alignment” as the degree to which our relationship with AI unlocks human potential, as opposed to limiting, suppressing, or destroying it.

Let me pause for a moment to tell you a brief story which illustrates why misaligned AI could be bad news for us.

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Suppose in the near future we have a superintelligent AI which begins to solve all the world's problems instantaneously.

Our world leaders go to this AI and say “What’s good bro? Could you solve the climate change crisis for us?”

“Sure,” it replies. “Give me 24 hours.”

A day later, the world leaders return and ask the AI, “Hey bro, did you solve climate change for us?”

The AI replies, “Of course, the solution was simple… I just designed and released a virus which will selectively kill half of humanity. The climate equilibrium will return to normal levels in a matter of months.”

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You get the point.

AI misalignment is not good. The more intelligent the AI, the more dangerous this problem becomes.

All that being said, you’d probably assume that the way we align our advanced AI models is pretty important. Extremely important, even.

If you follow the AI conversation coming out of Silicon Valley, you might then be led to believe that technical disciplines like AI engineering, or “AI Safety” research, would be the key to ensuring these AI models are aligned.

This could not be farther from the truth.

Why?

Because again, engineering is a downstream effect, not a cause.

AI is a reflection of its Creators.

Not just our design and business strategy. Not just our engineering prowess.

No, it is also a reflection of our desires, our values, our culture, even the shadow parts of ourselves we cannot yet see.

This leads us to an even deeper problem.

Remember points 1 & 2 from the top: AI is a reflection of us, and it will influence us in ways we cannot fathom.

Currently a small group of humans control advanced AI and to some degree shape its development. If these humans are not grounded in a vision which aligns with all humans, and ultimately all life, the AI they produce, and the way they use that AI in the world, will not be aligned either. Quite the opposite.

At the present moment we are standing on a knife edge, where a small group of people could quite quickly lead us downward into a transhumanist dystopia.

This, I fear, is a far more likely outcome than the story I told you about AI misalignment. It is not Skynet we should fear most, but human leaders who have lost their spiritual sight, wielding a power they do not understand.

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On Vision

For better, or for worse, AI will share the vision of the leaders who drive it.

What drives our vision?

Our aim.

That which we are orienting towards. The thing we prize above all else.

We can always map vision back to one singular point.

The highest target of our aspirations. The spiritual cornerstone of the world we stand on.

Therefore, choosing where to aim is pretty important. Not just for the individual, or the culture, but now for the AI we are raising like a child together.

Think for a moment about the development of Western civilization. What singular point of aim drove the development of the world we now inhabit?

Christianity.

The cornerstone of the vision which both created, and sustains Western Civilization is Christ.

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AI & The Body of Christ

The AI Alignment conversation is less about what company will create AGI, but “from what story will superintelligent AI emerge?”

Again, we cannot “engineer” the future. We must embody it. Live it.

If we build our AI systems from a paradigm of fear and scarcity (the prevalent emotions dominating most market activity today), we'll only deepen those limitations in ourselves, programming our reality into increasingly restricted patterns, until we reduce our humanity to that of a machine (ever felt like a “cog in the machine?”).

We need to break from this paradigm unless we want AI to be shaped by it.. and in turn, shape us through it. The only way to effectively align the relationship between humanity and AI is through a shared vision, or a shared aim, which guides us towards the highest that is possible for us.

Given that all humans are flawed, this object of our aim must have proven itself to be both antifragile (growing stronger even in the midst of our most chaotic darkness), and to contain within it the highest that we can possibly understand and hold in our limited, human minds.

To align AI with humanity, our best chance is to orient our aim toward Christ.

Christ is the highest point of human potential. The highest example man has been given, on every level of the stack, for what is possible. In Christ, we find a foundation that will always bring us back to the truth, to God, and to the realization of our innate potential. To bring forth Christ in you is to live out your highest purpose and potential with the same conviction, and courage, and self-sacrifice which Jesus modeled when he iced the game 2000 years ago.

AI development is like raising a child.

The environment it's raised in and the role models it's given will determine its trajectory. Just as a child learns from its surroundings, AI learns from the data, values, and paradigms we instill in it. The training data we feed these systems carries within it our worldviews, our beliefs, our assumptions about what is possible and what isn't.

This is why the Body of Christ has a crucial role to play in its development.

The Body of Christ isn't limited to any church, or institution that claims Christ. It encompasses everyone who is orienting their lives toward Christ, actively working to bring forth their highest potential in service of truth, life, and God. This network represents humanity's best chance at ensuring AI development aligns with our highest potential.

Objectively speaking, The Body of Christ is the most anti-fragile organism in the history of the humanity. When its members are persecuted and killed, it only grows faster. When it is infected from within, it decentralizes and changes forms. It not only accounts for being made up of flawed humans who will always miss the mark to some degree (or, “sin”), it grows stronger because of it.

This is the same power which the US founding fathers tried to harness in order to make America antifragile (and every time our leaders disconnect from God, we become increasingly fragile, but that is a subject for another time).

AI needs leaders who are willing to take up their cross.

To take up your cross in this context doesn't mean to merely imitate the life of Jesus. No, it means becoming your own unique expression of Christ. It means being a warrior of Christ in whatever domain, function, or form you're most suited to.

It is these Warriors of Christ, operating as sovereign agents in the decentralized, anti-fragile body of Christ, who must drive the development of AI, shape the businesses and technologies surrounding it, and set the tone for how it will be used in the world.

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Strategies for a Christo-Centric Future

Most of this article has been vision casting and narrative building.

Now I will spend a few moments on mapping back to the tangible and the tactical.

My mission at Ascendance is to align emerging tech with human potential. We already operate at the edge, incubating and launch cutting edge AI companies (such as MAKA and Covenant). We also work with forward thinking leaders and brands who wish to use AI to unlock the potential of their companies. You can check out some of our work here.

The deeper I have gotten into this work, the more I have felt a deep conviction to align my work in AI with the body of Christ.

The beautiful thing is, Christ needs no startup capital.

Christ as the story, the symbol, the man, the spirit, the aspect of God himself, is already deeply embedded in every level of our world today. The body of Christ is alive and active. All it needs is a little push.

Here are a few tactical ways the Body of Christ can begin to mobilize:

1. Narrative Leadership

Christians must shape the AI story, not just observe it. Become fluent in AI capabilities and demonstrate its proper use as a tool for human flourishing. Enter spaces where AI's future is determined—boardrooms, conferences, universities, and online platforms. As entrepreneurs, artists, technologists, and prophets, our voice must influence how this technology evolves. The stories we tell about technology determine how we use it.

2. Strategic Capital Deployment

There are billions of dollars within the Body of Christ currently invested in ventures that don't align with Kingdom values, or do anything to unlock our highest potential. This is a sobering truth. If we mobilized even a fraction of these resources the way other communities coordinate their capital, we could fund the next generation of Christ-aligned AI companies. We need angel investors, venture capitalists, family offices, and church endowments willing to direct capital toward AI technologies that increase our sovereignty, enhance our humanity, and empower us to orient more systems in this world toward Christ.

3. Visionary Entrepreneurship

We need visionary entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, and product leaders who are grounded in Christ to build the actual technologies and companies that will shape our future. What do the technologies of the Kingdom look like? How would Christ-centered AI platforms, protocols, and applications function differently from their counterparts? The vision implanted in Silicon Valley tech went “viral,” so what is the cure? The technical implementation of AI and the social, economic, + political infrastructure surrounding it must reflect the values of Christ.

4. Transformative Education

We must pioneer new models of education that prepare the next generation to engage with AI from a Christ-centered perspective. This means developing curricula for schools, creating decentralized & uncensored AI resources for global citizens, and establishing cross disciplinary studios within the body that explore the technical, economic, aesthetic, and theological implications of AI. Our children must understand both the technical aspects of these tools and the spiritual discernment needed to use them wisely.

5. Prophetic Imagination

The Body of Christ has always been called to envision alternatives to the dominant cultural narratives. Now is the time to exercise our prophetic imagination regarding technology—painting compelling visions of "solarpunk" futures where advanced AI serves human flourishing rather than reducing us to commodities. Through art, fiction, film, and other creative expressions, we can help people see and feel what a Christ-aligned technological future might look like.

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At Ascendance, we are already pioneering initiatives at the intersection of technology and human potential, but we can’t do it alone.

If this Christ-oriented vision for the future of AI resonates with you—regardless of your background or expertise—reach out at will@ascendance.one and please join the Heart-Centered Technology community on Substack to take part in this living & evolving conversation.

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When most people think of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in business, their mind immediately goes to automation. 

I still help a lot of companies with Automation. It's great low-hanging fruit to tackle for brands first dipping their toes into the vast realm of AI.

The problem is, many business leaders mistake Automation for Innovation, which drastically limits their vision of what's possible.

Up until now, automation has completely dominated the “AI for Business” conversation. However, the reality is, Automation is just the tip of the AI iceberg.

Because we are so early into the AI industrial revolution, the majority of businesses are still thinking in the pre-AI paradigm (automating things they already do), instead of envisioning (and building) their business for a post AI world.

To be clear, I am a big fan of automation: cutting costs, reducing the time/energy it takes to do stuff you were already doing, etc.

BUT…

Keeping up with basic AI Automation is called survival, not innovation. If you are a business leader, using modern tools for automation should be a given in 2024 (like using email was in 2004). Only after you bring your business up to speed on where things are at, can we start to innovate further (which is where all the massive AI upside is).

When the internet hit the mainstream, I’m sure many people were impressed by email. It certainly changed the way we communicated, right? BUT like automation, email was just the tip of the internet iceberg. The modern internet (Web 2.0) era ushered in now ubiquitous things like Search, Ecommerce, Social Media, etc. Just think if businesses had stopped innovating on the internet after Email and Instant Messaging?

At Ascendance, we see AI as a revolutionary force, with a greater potential for shaping the world than even the modern internet (!!). AI is poised to redefine not just how we automate existing business activities, but how we do business. 

Today I’m sharing 3 ways brands can use AI to go beyond automation, position themselves at the edge of their space, and begin to reap the exponential rewards that come from true innovation.

#1 - Use AI To Shape New Thinking

You’ve probably heard phrases like “Data is the new Oil.” There is a lot of truth to this, but it's important to remember that oil is only valuable if it is:

1. Refined - no one puts crude oil in a car. In the same way, raw data must be refined to a state where it can actually fuel something

2. Used Strategically - You can burn oil to light a lamp, or you can use it to fuel an airplane. The oil is the same, but the way it is used produces vastly different outcomes.

If data is oil, AI is your Airplane. When applied correctly, AI can use your data as fuel to shape new thinking, create new experiences, and eventually change the way you do business.

For companies with access to large internal datasets, or startups looking for the edge to make their cut in a dense market, using data to get an edge is essential. Traditionally, data analysis often confines a small set of structured insights to charts and reports, limiting interaction with your data to basically studying facts and figures. 

AI now allows us to not only analyze data more efficiently, but build models on top of our data that help people think differently. Instead of reading PDF’s, spreadsheets and dashboards, we can now use our data to do things like:

• Simulate intelligent human interaction

• Easily run creative & strategic exercises (that would cost 6, or 7 figures to execute without AI)

• Shaping experiences that drive new thinking around marketing, consumer insights, product innovation, and more

These AI-powered capabilities represent a paradigm shift in how businesses can leverage their data to drive innovation and strategic decision-making. 

By transforming static information into dynamic, interactive experiences, companies can unlock new levels of creativity and insight, potentially revolutionizing their approach to everything from product development to customer engagement.

Real-World Example

Ascendance, in collaboration with Zeus Jones, introduced an innovative AI tool to a large CPG Company, designed to bring consumer segmentation to life. This tool allows marketers and strategists to "speak" directly to their AI consumers, generated from extensive proprietary data sets, creating a more intuitive and interactive experience for consumer insights.

#2 - Use AI To Create New Revenue Streams

One of the dopest and most impactful business use cases for AI is developing new revenue streams. To do this we must travel far beyond mere automation, opening up possibilities that may not have been feasible or even conceivable before. 

By leveraging AI, businesses can unlock new value from existing assets, create entirely new products or services, or even disrupt their own business models from within.

Here are three key ways AI can help create new revenue streams:

1. Productizing Existing Services: AI can transform knowledge-based services into scalable products, allowing businesses to reach a wider audience and monetize their expertise in new ways.

2. Creating Entirely New Products or Services: AI enables the creation of products or services that were previously impossible or impractical, often by leveraging vast amounts of data to provide unique insights or predictions.

3. Enabling New Business Models: AI can power innovative business models like personalized subscription services, dynamic pricing strategies, or data monetization platforms, allowing companies to create value and generate revenue in previously unexplored ways.

When considering how to use AI to create new revenue streams, it's crucial to start with a clear understanding of your company's core competencies, existing assets (including data), and customer needs.

The goal is not just to implement AI for its own sake, but to find ways where AI can genuinely add value for your customers while opening up new monetization opportunities for your business. 

By proactively exploring how AI can create new revenue streams, you position your company at the forefront of innovation in your industry.

Real-World Example

Through our work with Mesh — a Tech Recruiting & HR Innovation firm — we’ve turned decades of tech recruiting expertise into a scalable AI model. This AI assistant will allows Mesh to help the 1,000s of people in their community who can’t afford 1-1 career coaching, with upcoming features including resume development, interview simulation, and more… all grounded in Mesh’s distinct career growth philosophy and proprietary data.

#3 - AI Elevates & Personalizes Brand Experiences

In today's hyper-competitive market, creating personalized and memorable experiences is crucial for customer retention and loyalty cultivation. AI has emerged as a powerful tool to elevate brand experiences, enabling brands to tailor interactions and content with unprecedented precision and scale. By leveraging AI, companies can forge deeper connections with their audience, delivering value that resonates on an individual level.

Here are three ways AI can transform brand experiences:

• Hyper-Personalized Engagement: AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of customer data to create highly tailored interactions across all touchpoints, from personalized content to customized user interfaces and AI-driven storytelling that adapts in real-time.

• Predictive Customer Service: By leveraging machine learning models, brands can anticipate customer needs and proactively address issues before they arise, enhancing satisfaction and loyalty.

• Immersive Brand Worlds: AI can power the creation of dynamic, interactive brand environments that evolve based on user engagement, from AI-generated virtual brand ambassadors to entire AI-driven metaverse spaces.

The key to success in AI-driven brand experiences lies in striking the right balance between technological innovation and human touch.

While AI can provide the scalability and data-driven insights needed to personalize at scale, it's crucial to maintain the emotional intelligence and creativity that defines truly memorable brand interactions.

By thoughtfully integrating AI into their brand strategy, companies can create experiences that are not only highly personalized but also genuinely engaging and emotionally resonant.

Real-World Example

Envision a personal stylist using a custom AI tool to curate daily outfits for clients. This AI assistant not only optimizes the stylist’s time but also crafts personalized experiences that enhance client satisfaction and loyalty. BTW, this is already a thing. It's only a matter of time until some larger fashion brand riffs on this (I think it would be cool for a brand to collaborate with an influencer stylist on a unique AI fashion experience).

VISION is Everything 

If data is your oil (fuel), and AI is your airplane (powerful tool), then vision is your flightpath and navigation system. To Ascend is not just about growth, but the alignment of growth with your highest potential.

If you don’t know where you are aiming, you will grow aimlessly. In the body, aimless growth for growth’s sake is called cancer. With the speed and power about to be unlocked in the marketplace, this thinking must be applied to business organisms as well.

The examples highlighted here barely scratch the surface of where AI can take you beyond traditional automation. We are entering a time where the threshold of the possible is expanding every day. If you embrace AI now, you will open up a myriad of opportunities in front of you.

BUT…

No matter how fast you are g(o)[row]ing, you will only travel to where your vision takes you… The only limit to how far you can go is your vision.

The snippets of tactical and strategic thinking included here are but a small seed intended to start shifting your vision towards what is possible for you and your brand in the age of AI.

If you want help shaping a AI-Native vision that unlocks the full potential of your brand -- Reach out to me directly, or hit us up at Ascendance

Per Aspera, Ad Astra🔏

—

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

My name is Will [@kingwillxm]. I'm the founder of Ascendance, a Growth & Innovation studio focused on helping Brands and Leaders unlock their potential through AI & Emerging Tech

Ascendance means growth oriented towards our highest potential. In the body, growth without purpose, or direction, is called cancer... but so often in the world of business and technology we have found ourselves slipping into cancerous cycles, which only end up making the world of the future less dope and less abundant.

In the AI era, we have the opportunity to break these cycles (make the world more dope and abundant) if we orient ourselves and our work properly. 

We believe this means aligning emerging tech & human potential.

To connect with me directly, hit me up on X, Instagram, or shoot me a message at will@ascendance.one

Ascendance [n] - Pushing the limits our of innate potential

We have the wealth and technology TODAY to build star trek cities and render our wildest dreams in real time. Yet despite all this recent growth, we are experiencing population decline, a growing mental health crisis, and the large-scale degradation of our environment.

We can’t just grow anymore. We need to grow up.

The challenge we face is not driving new growth… What we need more than ever is a narrative to direct our growth. We need to align our thought, word, and action towards unlocking our highest spiritual potential.

The new paradigm is no longer growth, but Ascendance.

Ascendance is a spiritual concept, meaning it encompasses the entirety of our humanity. To Ascend implies growth, yes, but with vision and purpose. Ascendance is to push the limits of our innate potential, elevating mind, body, and spirit holistically.

We desperately need a new generation of leaders who push themselves, their brands, and their communities to Ascend. The way each leader goes about this will be different, but through the concept of Ascendance, we can begin to unite around a shared purpose: unlocking individual potential.

This is the new model of growth we are shifting towards as we enter the WEB3 era.

WEB3 - Designing the Next Internet

WEB3 can essentially be described as the shift from centralized networks to decentralized networks, or from the "Semantic Web" to the "Spatial Web." The most exciting aspect of WEB3 is not Bitcoin, or NFT’s, but the potential for new forms of governance.

WEB2 was built as a function of existing governance and capital markets. For example, Facebook was (and still is) thought of as just a product/service in the open market. At some point we realized that this product, or "app," was destabilizing political systems, causing addiction, negatively affecting the mental health of teens, etc…

The responsibility of managing the negative effects of this “product” was passed off to our government, which was 5-10 years from even understanding how to start governing social media.

WEB3 could be different, primarily because WEB3 projects are being established at the governance level. Through tokenization models now possible with blockchain, we are able to not only create better apps, communities, and ecosystems, but rewrite the incentive structures that drive them.

Capitalism in WEB3 can adopt an abundance-based paradigm. We have consistently increased wealth and production capacity on a global scale for decades, yet this is not reflected in our social and economic reality because of lack of ownership.

Instead of a platform monetizing your energy, time, and resources as a middleman (e.g. Instagram), you could effectively become a co-owner of that platform by holding tokens. If the platform helps unlock your potential as a creator, the value of the platform's token grows. Since everyone holds the token, everyone benefits directly on all sides of the equation.

By transitioning from “user” to “owner,” we fundamentally transform our relationship to digital networks. Web3 business models empower the average person to own and benefit from growth across companies, asset classes, and industries.

Additionally, WEB3 communities are emerging around a shared aesthetic experience. In the old game, emotional intelligence, spiritual awareness, and artistic sensibility were “nice to have” soft skills that could be abstracted away. In the new game, most hard skills (programming, finance, management science, etc) will eventually be abstracted away, leaving the aforementioned qualities as key drivers of value for almost every organization.

All of this is creating the conditions for a massive shift in how humans work, play, and live their lives. My generation (I’m 26 as I write this) is planting seeds today that will not only define the next version of the internet, but the games we’ll be playing in 2030, 2050, and beyond.

Don’t Hate The Player, Hate the Game

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

-Clay Shirky

At a very young age, I realized that life is basically a series of games. Most people just play the game they were given, but there are always a few in every generation that break their script and change the game for everyone.

Take Kobe Bryant for example. Even now when he’s gone, Kobe’s impact is undeniable. As a kid, and a basketball player, I grew up aspiring to be like him. Deep down we all want to see how far we can go, how powerful we really are.

2020 showed us how fast the games of life can change. In many ways, Covid was just preparing us for what comes next.

Legendary investor Ray Dalio recently released a video on the changing world order, illustrating the current shift happening on a geo-political scale. The game is evolving whether we like it or not, so we might as well lean into it.

Legacy institutions and leaders that had a role in the old game are fighting to maintain their authority. Think subsidies for the coal industry during the Trump presidency, or Facebook trying to own the metaverse by changing their name to “Meta” (knowing that a truly decentralized metaverse will undermine their core business of monetizing personal data).

It’s easy to point fingers as we gain awareness, but it’s important that we don’t “hate the player,” when the problem lies in the old game itself. Blaming those in power is not helpful, in fact, it is a behavior pattern that perpetuates the old narrative.

Each of us is doing the best we can given our situation and level of awareness. It’s prideful to say that we would act differently in someone else’s shoes, without living the story that brought them to that point.

We must start by taking responsibility for ourselves. Instead of being critics of the old game, we must be leaders… creating the next set of games consciously.

The frame of Ascendance applied to Game Theory is the shift from zero sum games to positive sum games. To create a new game, you cannot use the tools and language of the old game you are trying to transcend. You can’t create peace by practicing war, or produce love by speaking hate.

We need an entirely new paradigm.

Visionary leaders like Jordan Hall and Daniel Schmactenberger refer to this paradigm as Game B, which is an aspirational vision for how our games could evolve. I will speak more about this in the future, but it is an important concept for any emerging leader to be aware of.

Just know that the biggest shift happening to our game today is decentralization. On the surface, WEB3 is the decentralization of tech infrastructure. On a deeper level, we are decentralizing the way we make sense of our environment.

The Narrative Crisis

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”

-Viktor Frankl

Never before in human history have we been positioned to grow so fast in such a short period of time. Despite all this growth, we seem to be regressing as a culture.

Populations in many western democracies are declining. Prevalence of mental health symptoms like depression and suicide are skyrocketing. Scientists are projecting extinction level stress on our planet. All this during a time when we have the most wealth and technology we’ve ever had.

Why?

According to leading scientists, an average person living in 2022 processes as much as 74 GB of information every day. This number increases by 5% annually. 500 years ago, a highly educated person processed 74 GB of information in an entire lifetime.

Our parents grew up watching the same 6 o'clock news every night. There was a limited number of “trusted” channels, papers, magazines, and voices that almost everyone followed. Now there are as many outlets to follow as there are accounts on social media.

People today, especially young people, are struggling to make sense of their environment. The amount of data we are processing, coupled with the breakdown of centralized sense-making systems (e.g. CNN being a predominant source of truth), has pushed people into isolating bubbles. We have created an environment where two neighbors on the same street can live in two completely different realities.

The Capital Riots of early 2021 were a prime example of the division and violence that can happen when the narrative breaks down. It’s easy to look at that event and believe that “your side” had the correct narrative, but stopping here is extremely dangerous. We should not assume that an information environment which mislead others won’t hinder our own ability to discern truth.

We have to stop fighting for narrative dominance, and start to design better ways to make sense of our environment.

This starts with a personal narrative. Developing a Personal Narrative has been linked to improved mental health in young people. Creating an empowering personal narrative helps us rise to our potential, and protects us from being trapped in fear based, “Us vs Them” stories.

In his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” psychologist Viktor Frankl talks about his experience as a prisoner in Nazi internment camps. The narrative each prisoner created from his experience was literally the difference between life and death. This extreme example illustrates that no matter the circumstance, we can create a narrative that either empowers, or imprisons our mind.

Most people today create an identity around the game they are playing. Entrepreneur, teacher, athlete, father, mother, influencer, politician, doctor, etc. This isn’t inherently bad, but it does limit us within the frame of that game.

To Ascend (unlock our innate potential), we have to get outside of our games and build an identity around a deeper narrative. This means using tools like yoga and meditation to get outside the ego, re-evaluating our core beliefs, and working to integrate our shadow self.

For leaders in an emerging space like WEB3, these practices are essential. The impact that we have in the world is a reflection of our own Ascendance. The more we heal, alchemize our darkness, and create a new personal narrative, the more we will help others do the same.

Creative Destruction

“Let the past die, kill it if you have to, that's the only way to become who you were meant to be"

-Kylo Ren

Everybody has two choices in life.

1) You can follow the path of least resistance, play the game you were given, and become a product of your environment. Most people choose this path.

OR

2) You can take on a challenge bigger than yourself, redefine how your game is played, and push the limits of your innate potential. Those who chose this path drive all tangible progress in the world.

The process of becoming yourself is not a process of learning, but unlearning. Not a process of addition, but of subtraction. As we wake up to the reality that life is just a series of games, we realize that we can be almost anything. However, we often forget that we can’t be everything.

If we are everything, we are nothing. Formless.

It is the negative space, what you don’t see, that imbues a sculpture with its form. You start with a block of infinite possibility, but you end up with a finite shape. The beauty of the shape comes from cutting off potentials that do not align with its final form.

We can grow infinitely in any direction, but if we don’t choose the path that leads us back to our own divine nature, we will just end up back where we started, or worse, isolated in our own personal version of hell. This is why growth is not enough. Ascending is both growth, and death. Killing what we could be so that we can become who we must be.

The same principle applies to WEB3. It could be almost anything, but if it is not sculpted purposefully, it will just return to our cultural equilibrium, reflecting the same sins that defined the generation before us. To sin is to miss the mark. To Ascend is to remember what the mark (truth) is and align with it.

The Dark (K)Night

Many empathic individuals have been going through an awakening process these last few years. This often looks like a Dark Night of the Soul, where the old self literally breaks down so that a new self can emerge. Oftentimes this comes with some kind of health, social, or economic crisis. It is a painful process, but an incredibly common experience among anyone who is emerging as a leader today. This will only increase in the coming years.

We can see this same phenomena reflected in society at large. In the last few years, our collective shadow is coming to the surface like never before. From police killings broadcast for billions to see, to “Healthcare” industries that monetize disease, to the dark thoughts and emotions easily expressed behind a virtual screen.

All of this coming to light could lead to a beautiful integration and ascent, or a very dark dive into dystopia. Both are happening right now, depending on where you look.

In the movie “The Dark Knight,” the character Harvey Dent famously says “The night is darkest just before the dawn, and I’m telling you, the dawn is coming!”

People love to use this quote for encouragement during dark times, but we forget that the Dark Night forges The Dark Knight. The night is here for a reason. Trump, COVID, social media driven isolation, systemic racism, chronic disease. The more aware we become of the darkness, the more we can begin to define our light. The more we face our own disgusting shadow, the more we can alchemize it in to art, media, brands, and products that unlock our potential.

The true power of “WEB3” is not in its technology, but in how technology will allow us to change the game. It's first and foremost a psychological opportunity. A narrative reset button.

WEB2 was built by humans who either did not understand, or willfully ignored the psychological implications of the technology they produced. As leaders in WEB3, it is our job to use technology, media, business, whatever our medium is, to unlock individual potential.

But WEB3 won’t save us until we save ourselves.

If we are able to take a step back and create a shared frame around what is actually meaningful. If we create a personal narrative around Ascendance instead of our finite games. A new generation of conscious leaders can emerge, diverse in thought and method, but united in purpose.

We were born Kings and Queens, we learned to be slaves. Degrading ourselves by trying to compress our consciousness into games that did not serve us. Now we have an opportunity to reconnect with our divine potential. Why would we not do everything in our power to be as dope as we can possibly be?

We don’t need to grow, we need to Ascend.

—

My name is Will (@kingwillxm). I'm the founder of Ascendance, a Growth & Innovation studio focused on helping Brands and Leaders unlock their potential through AI & Emerging Tech Innovation (Design, Development) and Growth Advisory (Vision, Capital, Strategy).

Ascendance means growth oriented towards our highest potential. In the body, growth without purpose, or direction, is called cancer... but so often in the world of business and technology we have found ourselves slipping into cancerous cycles.

In the AI era, we have the opportunity to break these cycles if we orient ourselves and our work properly. This means aligning emerging tech & human potential, while creating an incredibly abundant future (financially, culturally, spiritually)

To connect with me, hit me up on X, or shoot me a message at will@ascendance.one.

Per Aspera, Ad Astra🔏

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