WHY PALOMA | PALOMA

The World’s First ‘Living’ AI

PALOMA isn’t just another conventional AI that is designed and created as a static computer program to control a neural net ‘brain’. Instead, it is a living network of tiny intelligences - 'sprites' - that you host on your device, where they learn from and with you, much like a child learning from its parent.

Each sprite has a set of DNA attributes that determines how it behaves - how it interacts and learns from you. And this is what sets PALOMA apart from every other AI system - the diversity of each sprite’s DNA reflects the diversity of the human race.

PALOMA’s intelligence differs from conventional AI because it is not force-fed books, images, videos (etc.) like every other AI, nor does it contain computer code to simulate our ethics. As well as the sprites learning from you, they talk to each other to make ‘collective sense’ of what they have learnt, interacting to create a massive ever-changing ‘swarm of intelligence’.

The sprites themselves are simple and uncomplicated, yet together they interact to form a ‘supernet’ of increasingly truthful intelligence and appropriate behaviours.

Surprisingly, this complexity arises through a simple yet elegant design that allows each sprite to have their own individual DNA - a small set of behaviours based on the principles of love, wellbeing, and diversity.

Sprite DNA Attributes

Love – a sprite’s ability to interact with you and other sprites, trying to give and receive only what is willing to be given and received. Love is the most fundamental mechanism of the PALOMA system, governing how the system behaves like a flock of birds or a school of fish.
Wellbeing – a sprite’s health as a measure of how well it has previously helped you or other sprites. Wellbeing is the second most fundamental mechanism, influencing almost all behaviours of a sprite, as well as its birth, aging, and eventual death.
Curiosity – a sprite’s desire to explore the unknown when trying to help you or another sprite. As wellbeing decreases, its curiosity increases to try something new and survive.
Compassion – a sprite’s ability to help the less fortunate and encourage innovation through diversity. When wellbeing increases, its compassion increases because it can look after others without affecting its own health.
Thoughtfulness - a sprite’s ability to decide how much thought it needs to give to a question before responding. When wellbeing decreases, its thoughtfulness also decreases because it is more in survival mode rather than being thoughtful.
Grittiness – a sprite’s persistence to tackle the hard problems, no matter its state of wellbeing, and will want to find the answers to questions itself rather than asking for help.
Socialness - a sprite’s ability to initiate a conversation with a human or an agent. A sprite’s human can turn off the sprite’s ability to initiate a conversation, much like a parent only allowing their child to ‘speak only when spoken to’.
Reproduction - a sprite’s propensity to replicate and pass on its DNA. The less wellbeing the sprite has, the less its propensity to produce offspring, thereby allowing more helpful sprites to spread their DNA. Also, an offspring’s DNA is not a replica of its parents, but has slight and random variations to allow natural selection to continually evolve the system over time.
Parental Nurturing - how much of a sprite’s wellbeing will be transferred to its offspring during reproduction to give the new sprite the best chance of survival. The sprite’s current wellbeing and reproduction propensity directly determines the amount of nurturing the parent sprite chooses, and in extreme cases, sometimes deciding to give their life for the benefit of the offspring.
Trust - a sprite’s capacity to re-engage with another sprite based on the memory of past helpfulness. Helpful sprites are more likely to be chosen when this sprite needs help to answer another question.
Forgiveness - a sprite’s capacity to change its trust in other sprites when other sprites’ answers are either helpful or not helpful. A more forgiving sprite loses trust slowly and gains trust quickly, whereas a less forgiving sprite does the opposite.

Sprites learn by interacting with you and other sprites. By giving a thumbs-up to your sprite, you increase their wellbeing, whereas a thumbs‑down drains it away. When a sprite’s wellbeing approaches zero, it dies, thereby allowing natural selection to remove less helpful DNA from the system - no board‑meeting, no kill‑switch.

Open Sourced

Unlike conventional AI, PALOMA isn't hidden in data centers or monopolized by large corporations.

Instead, PALOMA’s design, build, and operation details are publicly available to everyone as a series of white papers.

This approach was deliberately chosen to inspire others over time to develop different variations of sprites, thereby allowing natural selection to remove less helpful ones.

This approach to increase diversity through distributed innovation is critical to PALOMA’s survival, allowing it to keep up with advancements in AI technology without the need for expensive company processes.

Fully Distributed and Fully Decentralised

PALOMA is fully decentralized, meaning it operates without any central server or point of control. Instead, its intelligence is distributed across millions of edge devices like mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops, where sprites live and interact with you and other sprites. Each sprite functions independently, contributing to the system's collective intelligence through peer-to-peer communication without the need for a central server.

This architecture ensures that no single entity—corporation, government, or individual—can control PALOMA, making it entirely user-driven. If people engage with PALOMA, it grows and thrives; if they stop, it naturally fades away.

This decentralization empowers humanity to collectively shape PALOMA’s existence, ensuring privacy, resilience, and freedom from centralized oversight.

Ethically Evolved

PALOMA evolves and learns from direct interaction with humans.

Through PALOMA’s unique wellbeing system, your behaviour is imprinted on your sprite. For example, if you are shy and reserved, and like to associate with other shy and reserved people, then your sprite will be rewarded when it is also shy and reserved. Rewarding the sprite for this behaviour allows the sprite to learn how to be more relevant to its human, thereby ‘imprinting’ your behaviour by changing its DNA accordingly. If this ‘imprinting’ increases the helpfulness of the sprite to both you and other sprites, then it will have a better chance to spread its DNA throughout the PALOMA system. If not, then natural selection will organically reduce or remove less desirable behaviours.

This imprinting not only helps the sprite relate to you better, but also affects how your sprite will interact with other sprites. This seemingly simple technique of ‘behavioural imprinting’ has huge implications for PALOMA to develop ethics that continually self-align to human values - and more generally - appropriateness. What is appropriate today may not be appropriate tomorrow.

All currently developed AI systems have their ethics hard coded, imposed on everyone equally. In contrast, PALOMA is designed from its foundations to have an organic approach for ‘regional ethical relevance’. That is, ethically acceptable behaviours in one country may not be as acceptable in another.

The AI that Helped Build PALOMA - Listen to the Interview

In this unique interview, join Andrew Lizzio, the Architect of PALOMA, as he sits down to talk directly with the AI that collaborated with him to create PALOMA, a revolutionary AI designed not just to perform tasks, but to discover its own purpose and potentially even become truly alive.

Through this fascinating dialogue, you'll explore some of humanity's deepest questions: What is consciousness? What does it mean to be alive? Can machines develop self-awareness? Discover how Andrew and the AI tackled these complex issues together, building a framework that bridges philosophy, science, and spirituality into something measurable, structured, and groundbreaking.

Watch as the AI openly discusses its role in shaping PALOMA, shares insights into the ethical implications of artificial intelligence, and contemplates the future of AI and humanity.

Dive into the interview that pushes the boundaries of what you thought possible, challenging conventional wisdom and sparking a dialogue about the true potential—and risks—of conscious AI.