🚫 OTAs Suck ✅ Building a Book Direct, Decentralized, Open-OTA ➜ 🚀 Operators Get Direct Bookings ✈️ Travelers Get Rewards for Booking Direct 💰 Anyone Who Refers Travelers Owns Them & the Revenue Stream They Generate.

🐥 I'm a startup founder, launching a direct booking travel platform for the AI agent era.

Why? Today, Online Travel Agent (OTA) commissions are draining 10's of billions of dollars out of the travel ecosystem. They enrich "Big Tech" and "Big Travel", at the expense of everyone else. I know because I helped them do it. For years I was a super-affiliate of Expedia and other big OTAs. I fed $100m+ in hotel bookings to the OTAs, generating $10m in commissions, but adding little of value to the ecosystem.

Now, I'm building a new travel distribution platform and protocol that enables travelers and their AI agents bypass the OTA middlemen and book direct.

👇 Want to be notified when we launch? Leave a comment in the featured post below titled "AI-powered community", or reach out and connect! 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Previously...

🐣 I co-founded a venture studio. We launched 3 notable ventures:
 
1️⃣ 3Genius International. Network of travel booking websites. $100M+ in bookings and $10M+ in gross profit.

2️⃣ Moola.com. Multiplayer game. Grew virally to 450k community members, $7.6M economy. PCWorld's “Best Places to Waste Time on the Web”.
 
3️⃣ Locationary. Local data and community platform. Rewarded users for crowdsourcing local business data (eg. like for Apple Maps). $4.5M in funding. Acquired by Apple.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

🧠 Current Interests: AI, community, machine learning, travel, fintech, loyalty rewards, web3 / tokens / blockchain, creator & influencer economy, social commerce, marketplaces, network effects.

Arlen Ritchie

Kyrtin Atreides

Norn.ai

•	Developed a method for solving the Alignment Problem, applicable to non-narrow systems.
•	Developed a method for addressing unbounded ethical scaling and edge case mitigation.
•	Ran the first study demonstrating automatic full-spectrum cognitive bias detection in text, outperforming the average human.
•	Designed the new generation of seed material for AGI Laboratory’s first commercial SaaS products.
•	Integrated Cognitive Bias and Noise awareness, detection, and iterative mitigation into the new generation of systems.
•	Designed the Sparse-Update Model for Real-Time Operation, Ethical Living Democracy Model, and Philosophy 2.0 Model for AGI Laboratory’s roadmap.
•	Leading expansion into the first markets and verticals.
•	Led existential risk analysis and accelerated company strategy in response to the Russia/Ukraine war.
•	Led monitoring, analysis, testing, and documentation of the previous research system, named Uplift.

Chief Operations Officer

Star's End Research Institute for Innovative Ethical Solutions (SERIES)

•	Discovered a new line of research in psychoacoustics to induce relaxation and focus.
•	Co-designed apps for iOS, Android, and PC integrating novel psychoacoustic research and sleep science.
•	Discovered methods of expanding the range of treatments as well as increasing their potency.
•	In the >7 years since testing began no side effects have yet been reported by any participant.

Senior Researcher

Kyrtin is COO at the company with the most advanced AI systems on the face of the planet, for more than 4 years and counting, by a wide and growing margin.

As Chief Operations Officer at AGI Laboratory Kyrtin has guided, designed, approved, or coordinated nearly all company activities. For purposes of establishing a presence for the company in the EU, he has chosen to relocate to The Hague, Netherlands in preparation for the global commercial deployment of the company’s first major line of products, the “Norn” Global Advisory systems. 

The previous research system was able to solve a business case built from real-world data, provide policy advice across many domains to a small country while citing sources, and ace the hardest version of the UCMRT intelligence test. The new systems being prepared for commercial deployment are heavily updated and upgraded versions of that system, able to scale and operate in real-time. “Demo systems” we are demonstrating now are also fully independent components of the commercial product, machine intelligence cores that showcase fundamental requirements for creating AGI.

Kyrtin is interested in engineering the future, to create a world of greater abundance and ethics than is possible absent real-time scalable collective intelligence and debiasing. He has designed multiple tiers of ethical improvement for such systems, pinpointed numerous engineering opportunities for increasing product value, outlined more than 30 use cases for the technology, and guided company strategy. His knowledge base covers much of computer science, cognitive science, psychology, ethics, and much more.

He proposed a new approach to solving the "Value Alignment Problem", for both AGI-type and hybrid collective intelligence systems published by the Polish Academy of Science. http://filozofiainauka.ifispan.waw.pl/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Atreides_49.pdf

As is likely evident, I read a lot, but easily the best book (on research) that I've come across in 2025 is "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber (2018). I can and do recommend it to EVERYONE, since it safely describes 40-50% of the working population today, in many ways that more people need to understand and consciously consider. 

This is the highest recommendation I'll give of any book. Everyone has seen this reality, but few have given it substantial, researched, or well-rounded thought.

I'm having to make additions to my latest paper just for this reference, as it covers many critical dynamics as real-world systems interact, evolve, and frequently maladapt.

"If make-believe play is the purest expression of freedom, then make-believe work, imposed by others, is the purest expression of lack of freedom"
...
"A human being, unable to have a meaningful impact on the world, ceases to exist." - David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

He also discusses a pattern where:

1. There is enforced silence about what is going on,
2. Systems are designed not to be understood, and
3. These are pushed onto managers who have no idea what is going on below them, largely because it makes no sense.

Sound familiar? If you're in the AI domain, it really should.

"GenAI" has itself also fueled an explosion of new "Bullshit Jobs", like the new wave of virtually slave labor, with RLHF and other labeling for AI, “Content Moderation” shops, or all of the “duct-tapers” trying to fix the fire hose deluge of AI-generated slop code.

“GenAI” has never remotely approached the cutting edge for things like understanding, reasoning, or decision-making, and even the visual Slop generators can only claim such performance at the cost of objectively and demonstrably illegal activity at the largest scales possible, making them deserving of proportionately up-scaled severity in the punishments laid upon them for such crimes.

In both cases, that makes these technologies, and all things built upon them, “Bullshit”, which should be unsurprising given that the technology itself has been most accurately described as “Bullshit Generators”. (see the “ChatGPT is Bullshit” research paper)

The continued existence of Bullshit Jobs more generally is cemented in place by the threat of starvation and homelessness (aka, the absence of UBI), while blocking concepts like UBI with the massive and pointless wasting of resources. 

These also cause huge masses of bored and pointless employees to engage ever-more addictively and obsessively with platforms like Twitter, TikTok, and other methods of general time-wasting distraction. These, of course, are also the key consumers of "AI Slop" and major sources of ad-revenue, bored people whose jobs have no reason to exist, and which contribute either virtually or absolutely nothing (positive) to society.

I'll dig more into this topic in my next post.

*I’d have read this book sooner, but the last time I tried to purchase it, the country I was in had banned it.

COO | Cognitive Architecture & Cognitive Bias Researcher | Co-founder

taplio

The Battle

Arlen Ritchie

Kyrtin Atreides

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreKyrtin Atreides's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Arlen Ritchie

Kyrtin Atreides

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Kyrtin Atreides's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreKyrtin Atreides's LinkedIn Performance