Much of the fear around AI centers on misalignment – the idea that powerful systems might act against human interests. Vincent Weisser worries about something different: what happens if advanced AI systems are perfectly aligned with the interests of a small group of institutions? That concern led him to co-found Prime Intellect, a startup building open infrastructure for training and deploying advanced AI models. Before Prime Intellect, Weisser helped organize Vitalik Buterin’s Zuzalu experiment and worked in decentralized science, where he helped unlock roughly $40 million in funding for unconventional research. Today, he’s applying that same open ethos to AI, working to ensure the tools that shape superintelligence remain broadly accessible rather than concentrated in the hands of a few.

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In our conversation, we explore:

Why Vincent believes multiple superintelligences are safer than one
The intellectual influences that shaped Vincent’s thinking about intelligence and progress, including David Deutsch and Nick Bostrom
Prime Intellect’s evolution from distributed compute infrastructure to frontier model training and reinforcement learning tools
Why Vincent believes open and decentralized science could accelerate discovery
The Zuzalu experiment and what it suggests about the future of scientific communities
The role of aesthetics and craft in building technology
Why Europe might have a cultural advantage in a post-superintelligence world
Vincent’s predictions for the next five years of AI