Public AI
A vision for a robust ecosystem of initiatives that promote public goods, public orientation, and public use throughout every step of AI development and deployment.
Overview
Commercial actors drive the current AI ecosystem, for better and for worse. While private companies have created significant innovations, an AI ecosystem powered exclusively by the market will prioritize a narrow set of profitable applications. Meanwhile, critical work — such as using AI to detect illegal mining operations, facilitate deliberative democracy, and deliver medicine directly to patient homes — is under-resourced relative to its societal value. The status quo poses a major structural risk: We can’t rely on a few companies to build everything our society needs from AI, and we can’t afford the risk that they won’t.
Ensuring AI benefits humanity requires expanding who has the power and opportunity to build AI in the first place. That’s why we need Public AI: a robust ecosystem of initiatives that promote public goods, public orientation, and public use throughout every step of AI development and deployment — from how compute and data are provided, to how tools and workers are involved.
