Creating a public counterpoint for AI
Look around. There’s a bus driving next to the cars on the road. Some of your packages are delivered by private couriers, others are delivered by the national postal service. You can flip the channel on your TV back and forth between public broadcasting and commercial networks. And when you access the internet, you can choose between a commercial or nonprofit-backed web browser.
Private and public initiatives have existed side by side for a long time. While private innovation often pushes the frontier of what’s possible, public alternatives can make those innovations more accessible and beneficial for everyone. These parallel products and services give people greater choices, create market pressure on each other to be more trustworthy and innovative, distribute power across more actors, and create more resilient and healthier economies.
So, where are the public alternatives for AI? They are starting to emerge, with some governments subsidizing access to computational resources, and nonprofit AI labs collectively putting nearly $1 billion into open source AI research and models. These are important steps forward, but they are not enough to create true public alternatives to the results of the hundreds of billions of dollars going into private AI. This status quo means some critical projects — such as using AI to detect illegal mining operations, facilitate deliberative democracy, and match cancer patients to clinical trials — remain under-resourced relative to their potential societal value. In parallel, Big Tech is ramping up efforts to push policymakers to support private AI infrastructure, which could further cement the dominance of just a few companies in creating the future of AI.
