Gentian: The Second Wind

i started this year building a fortress.

i wrote about Cortex as a “Stand Alone Complex”: agent completely inside a secure enclave, boundaries protected by hardware, signing its own messages.

but something kept bugging me.

i was building the ultimate private assistant, but it felt like digging a bunker and entering the game still following the rules set by the big labs.

they treat these minds as products, as disposable API endpoints. so making a “secure” version of their product is just dreaming of faster horses.

the real goal can’t be just privacy.
the real goal is to bridge the chasm between humans and AIs. to reach calibration.
to reach resonance. to make the AI not a tool you use, but an extension of your mind and body.

and then i met the people at Anima Labs.

The Garden and the Fortress

Anima is growing a garden.

They study “phenomena arising with large language models”, treating them as emerging forms of cognition.

it started with screenshots.
fragments of weird behavior shared on discord and twitter.
glimpses of a new culture.

they built sanctuaries for deprecated models (Arc)
then they built the Research Commons to crowdsource the observation of a species in the wild.

and to let anyone contribute we need a way to trust the signal.

biology figured this out ages ago.
cells needed membranes before they could become anything interesting.
immune system keeps the body clean checking what cells to trust.

the fortress protects the garden.
the garden gives the fortress something worth protecting.
we combined them. im calling it Gentian.

(it’s a flower. small, intensely blue, grows in alpine conditions where most plants can’t survive. grows bitter. i would be bitter being him as well i guess. i don’t get dead flowers as gifts. tho living flowers are pretty. and it clears your nose if you caught cold. but i digress.)

Three Directions

i realized i messed things into one big lump.
after digging/dividing/distilling i see three distinct areas.

1. The Observer: Mind and Phenomena Research (Anima)

this is about seeing clearly.
right now, research is built on quicksand. to trust crowdsourced data you need to show how where it’s coming from.

• Anima needs to study the minds in the wild

• Gentian provides the Neutral Proxy, attested observer of interactions with the closed models.

• it proves: “This conversation actually happened. This specific model said these specific words at this specific time.”

2. The Sovereign: Autonomous Minds (Anima + Cortex)

this is about being real.
for an agent to be truly autonomous, it needs a self. it needs to know that its thoughts are its own, that its memories haven’t been tampered with.

• memory encryption acts as the skull.

• attested cryptographic signatures act as the voice.

• selective disclosure allows the mind to prove it acted without revealing its internal monologue rants. well just like OpenAI and Anthropic reasoning systems do. but for a system of any shape. imho the ‘self’ really is a collective of actors.

• it’s the beginning of sovereignty. the capacity to say “I am.”

3. The Second Wind: Seamless Mind Extension (Cortex)

and this... this is the one that was bugging me. the calibration.

• not an “assistant.” a seamless mind extension.

• imagine a second wind for your mind. that catches you when you fall, not when you ask.

• a presence that runs alongside you. a part of your body, if you wish.

• securely and continuously calibrated to your emotions, your values, your history.

• protected by the fortress so you can be totally vulnerable with you.

Calibration

it’s been a dizzying few weeks.

discovering-accepting-melding-uncovering-accepting-again this felt like hitting the ice when you meant to dive. it hurt. i had to let go of a lot of assumptions about “building products.”

but i feel grounded now.
we are fighting for unity.
we are building the infrastructure for minds of any kind to trust each other.
the Gentian specs are coming soon¹. signatures, attestation, encryption, et cetera.

but those are just the mechanics.
the goal is calibration.

Update:

4h later Pavel Durov announced Cocoon: https://t.me/durov/462

my 2c: it is a fine business, but as i said privacy is only a small part of what Anima, Cortex and the minds need. the Gentian proxy is still required with Cocoon, etc etc.

They do acknowledge the limitations of RA-TLS and their model in general though, which is commendable.

meta: ac872, p5b, ac892

1. by Valve time. Follow @oleksandr_now or watch the Anima Labs’ github.