As the famous African proverb says, "If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together."
Which is why, alongside our work building Semble, we've also been working on the ecosystems necessary for large-scale systems change in science. MOSAIC is the result of that work - it's a new R&D program developed in collaboration with and incubated through Renaissance Philanthropy's Big if True Science accelerator. Read more at
or follow along here for a shorter version.
Coordination is science’s biggest bottleneck.
AI can make individual scientists dramatically more productive. But the system that turns individual work into collective knowledge — how we share, evaluate, and build on each other's research — has barely evolved.
This theme, which is essentially the same African proverb applied to science, is coming up in countless recent articles. This example is from Astera’s metascience essay competition:
The most common frustration, cutting across nearly every category, was coordination failure. Not a shortage of ideas or data or even funding, but the absence of any mechanism for doing collectively what no individual lab or team can do alone.
Coordination requires a medium.
But the medium of science - the paper - hasn’t changed in centuries, and it’s breaking. Spoiler: open protocols like atproto (+ a few other things) can be that new medium. How so?
In 2011, Michael Nielsen's Reinventing Discovery laid out a vision for networked science. He argued that the internet and open online collaboration could democratize and accelerate science by applying the coordination patterns behind successful large scale projects like Wikipedia and Linux: composable and modular micro-contributions, low contribution barriers, networked in the open, at enormous scale. Despite some initial encouraging examples, Nielsen’s own assessment was that we had fallen far short of the potential for networked science.
The vision was brilliant but the right substrate didn't exist yet.
MOSAIC is a program to build it.
MOSAIC (Modular Open Science, AI & Collective Intelligence) is an R&D program to realize the vision of networked science. Our hypothesis is that an intentionally designed networked research medium will enable humans and agents to solve crucial coordination challenges and radically accelerate breakthroughs.
Why now?
Three mutually reinforcing developments are converging, creating a unique opportunity to implement the networked coordination patterns identified by Nielsen:
1) Modular research tools (such as Discourse Graphs) are making it possible to represent the actual process of research (hypotheses, questions, critiques, evidence) as machine-readable units. Early deployments are showing promising evidence that they help researchers think and collaborate better.
2) Open social protocols. Meaningful microcontributions already happen on social media, such as discussion and evaluation of research. Open protocols like AT Protocol let us finally recognize those contributions, and build entirely new app experiences around them! On infra research communities control. The 30+ independent ATScience apps demonstrate the generative power of open ecosystems.
3) AI - As Charles Yang recently observed, "AI productivity gains in science are rate-limited by the pace at which the scientific collective can update from new discoveries and findings." This makes networked science even more relevant: AI can contribute across the research lifecycle but lacks the “API” to do it traceably and verifiably (which modular research provides). Social networks provide an essential layer of human trust, curation and communication.
How to fund it?
Networked research, which thrives on openness and collaborative ecosystems, has also long been blocked by an infrastructure funding gap. Cutting edge philanthropy (like Renaissance Philanthropy are developing) can fund at infrastructure scale and build ecosystems rather than just products.
Program structure
MOSAIC is organized into two efforts: MOSAIC Core builds the shared stack and leads adoption with pilot communities. MOSAIC Fund backs supporting projects across modular research, AI, and open social protocols (such as ).
MOSAIC is also partnering with Catalyze, a funding platform for research, to connect contribution data directly to research funding. Funders will be able to make informed allocation decisions based on real time data from the MOSAIC network. Part of the MOSAIC pool will be used to match contributions made through Catalyze, effectively turning community expertise into allocation signals.
The revolution will be networked
In Reinventing Discovery, Nielsen wrote
To historians looking back a hundred years from now, there will be two eras of science: pre-network science, and networked science.
We have long had the vision and theory for networked science, but lacked the means to implement it. New protocols, networks and technological capabilities, combined with new funding models, open a unique window of opportunity. MOSAIC is a program to catalyze the networked science revolution at a time when it has never been more needed.
With intentional design of new coordination mediums, maybe we can move far, fast and together?