Ashton Hettiarachi: How OpenxAI Will Change the World’s Perceptions?

For Ashton Hettiarachi, the central question around artificial intelligence is not only how powerful it will become. It is who gets to control it.

The founder of OpenxAI grew up in Sri Lanka and recalls experimenting with technology from an early age, including building a small local FM radio station as a teenager. Years later, the same instinct toward open systems sits behind his approach to AI.

“We believe AI is one of the greatest invention that human has ever created.”

In this episode of REVELATIONS, Hettiarachi explains the idea of permissionless AI – moving beyond open-source models toward infrastructure where developers can launch AI services, control their data and interact directly through peer-to-peer systems.

At the time of the interview, he described OpenxAI as an attempt to reduce the layers required to build an AI business – from cloud infrastructure and payments to access and ownership.

But the conversation also explores the other side of AI.

Asked whether people should be afraid of its future, Hettiarachi gives an unusually direct answer:

“Short answer is yes.”

His concern is not simply that AI could become more intelligent. It is that data, compute, talent and increasingly powerful AI systems can become concentrated in the hands of a small number of corporations.

That concern explains why Hettiarachi does not describe OpenxAI as a conventional startup.

“I don’t consider we have a business. We are a network.”

His ambition is correspondingly long-term: to help technology move humanity toward what he calls a transition from a “type zero” to a “type one civilization.”

For Hettiarachi, opening AI is therefore more than a business model. It is a question of who gets to participate in intelligence before intelligence itself becomes dramatically more powerful.