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Tim Berners-Lee is quite possibly the most trustworthy man in technology.
Amid the broader landscape of financially motivated tech entrepreneurs, the inventor of the Web has made his innovation free and open, accessible to everyone. Even today, in the age of tech billionaires, he stands by his decision not to sell all his money to profit from his work. “It’s more fun to have the Internet,” he told an audience at SXSW in London on Wednesday.
Berners-Lee, 70, has a legacy of building technology designed to benefit humanity, and continues to do so today. In collaboration with John Bruce, CEO of Berners-Lee Inc., Inrobotpresented to a SXSW audience His AI agent, Charlie.
Charlie isn’t actually a new idea — it was originally proposed by Berners-Lee about a decade ago as an alternative to the chatbots Apple-owned Siri and Amazon-owned Alexa. But unlike those assistants, who ultimately work for Big Tech’s overlords, Charlie is an AI-powered assistant designed to serve only you.
On condition Amnesty International agent It is a system that can make decisions and actions on your behalf, and trust is absolutely imperative here. It would be very easy while interacting with popular LLMs or chatbots – be it ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or any other agent assistant – to leave messy traces of your personal and private information all over the internet if they had unfettered access to your data.
Charlie is different. There are several steps to how this works, but to put it simply, imagine that all your data is stored in a vault that you own and control. Charlie is effectively the gatekeeper to this vault and will interact on your behalf with any LLM administrators requesting access to your data. Before it delivers anything, it will ask for your permission first.
If you grant permission, it will obfuscate – changing small details – before your data is delivered to the service you request. This way, the LLM will have enough information to give you an accurate answer, but not to get a read on you and your identity.
AI agent for your banking information
Most people will likely first meet Charlie through their bank, Bruce told me in a follow-up interview at SXSW. He added that he “definitely” believes that at some point it will become an app that you can get on your phone.
The timing of the technology is crucial – and may already be overdue. People are already freely uploading financial information to LLMs, Bruce said. He added that the intimacy with which they know you afterwards is scary, and they will never forget it.
At a time when our trust in the world’s profit-motivated big tech companies seems fragile, knowing that Charlie was created by Berners-Lee is reassuring. However, his involvement is not the only, or even the main, reason to trust Charlie, according to Bruce.
John Bruce and Tim Berners-Lee.
Trust in technology will be built when it is used by institutions we already trust with our most valuable assets, including our banks, but in some cases, government agencies or other entities.
Right now, Inrupt has begun working with key partners to bring Charlie out into the world so he can help us protect sensitive data, like our financial and health information. With the right momentum, Charlie may finally have a trusted presence on our phones, giving us confidence that we are in charge of our digital destinies.
After many years of talking about Charlie’s values and working out how they should work, Berners-Lee said he was “very happy” (that’s a British word for “very pleased”) to bring the client out into the world.
As the largest artificial intelligence companies in the world Prepare for their IPOsit’s comforting to know that at least one of the best minds in technology is still thinking about people rather than big numbers.
