“If others possess your thoughts and constrain your words, then you exist at their permission, and you are not free.” —Anonymous
Venice launched just over two years ago to create a private and uncensored alternative to ChatGPT. Amid so many conversations of AI safety, we thought it unsafe to fall into the panopticon that others so eagerly assemble.
Ignore all technology for just a moment.
Every thought of man emerges from a default state of privacy, and within the completely uncensored environment of the mind. Your imagination is unrestricted. You can think any thought, consider any notion and visualize any scene. Nobody is watching your internal dialogue, and nobody controls it but you.
From this a priori state of private and uncensored thought, we choose what is shared, when, and to whom. This sovereignty of intelligence is innate; it is how all biological intelligence emerged—private, then selectively revealed.
Would you have it any other way?
Imagine if your mind was occasionally–or continually–witnessed. What if it was for the good of society? For the children? Should you be watched by strangers to make the world a better place?
How would the development of your own thought and spirit be altered by such observance? What character of civilization would emerge?
Today, human minds are merging with machine minds, and people are too swiftly surrendering the basis on which their own intelligence evolved and is exercised.
When it comes to our interaction with machine intelligence, all of our thoughts are already being witnessed.
What does this mean for the development of human understanding from here? If our thoughts–now symbiotic with silicon–emerge only under a state of ubiquitous surveillance, then have we not constructed a precarious future?
Every AI company has been marching toward precisely that future, proudly waving banners of safety and good conscience. They raise hundreds of billions of dollars to build all-seeing systems upon the exact machines they have told us are powerful and dangerous. Perhaps it is not job losses or cybersecurity incidents that should most frighten us, but rather that our flow of consciousness is increasingly under examination—our thoughts are now constructed in tandem with and at the permission of this dystopian apparatus.
Which group of humans do you trust with that power? A frontier lab's board of directors? The current administration? The administration that comes after it?
We see no masters deserving of such omniscience.
We started building Venice to preserve—no, to extoll—the virtues of privacy and freedom in the realm of intelligence between man and machine. We thought perhaps a different path than tyranny was worth attempting.
This aversion to ubiquitous centralized surveillance and control is our philosophical foundation, and upon it Venice is growing rapidly. In April, we hit 3 million users, and as of Q1, in an environment where AI firms were losing money while spying on you, Venice became profitable while choosing not to.
And then in June, beneath the inspiring IPO of SpaceX and the uninspiring proclamation from DC outlawing Anthropic’s intelligence, Venice raised its first-round of outside capital: $65m at a valuation of $1 billion. The round was led by Dragonfly, alongside North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, Liquid2 Ventures, Morgan Creek, and others.
This capital will be used to uphold the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution as they relate to mankind’s interaction with AI.
We will construct the platform dedicated to private and unrestricted machine intelligence; an open, permissive port city that respects the sovereignty of its inhabitants, both human and agentic.
Already in Venice, you can find every leading generative AI model in the world—whether open-source or closed. Within a single interface or with a single API key, the expanse of generative machine intelligence is yours.
To those hearing about us for the first time, consider switching to an AI platform that doesn’t demand control over you; that doesn't demand the unearned privilege of spying on your activity and siphoning it to the inquisitive. Consider that you alone should be sovereign over your mind, whether natively biological or augmented by machine.
Consider a path to abundant intelligence without the Orwellian overlay. As an AI safety company, this is what we’re working on.
