This whitepaper sets out a vision for a different path for AI. Societies don’t have to just consume the AI technologies shaping their lives—they can create them. We call for a new collective enterprise: building AI infrastructure for the common good. Public investments can unleash a wave of innovation, expanding access to better tools, and in time expanding our collective imagination.

Powerful AI systems are the culmination of milennia of collective effort. Their algorithms are derived from decades of public research. Their models are trained on mountains of interviews, articles, and books. Yet the concentration of AI development within a handful of unaccountable firms threatens to write the public out of our story.

That’s why a new collective effort is needed. To ensure AI serves the common good we must build the next generation of public infrastructure: Public AI. Building Public AI together offers a way to invest in a solid foundation for the next century of progress: ensuring that trustworthy AI systems protect our shared values, that flourishing marketplaces spark innovation on every problem, and that everyone has the tools they need to tackle the greatest problems facing society.

Three features of Public AI can put the public in the driver’s seat and accelerate us towards the common good:

• Public Access – Certain capabilities are so important for participation in public life that access to them should be universal. Public AI provides affordable access to these tools so that everyone can realize their potential.
• Public Accountability – Public AI earns trust by ensuring ultimate control of development rests with the public, giving everyone a chance to participate in shaping the future.
• Permanent Public Goods – Public AI is funded and operated in a way to maintain the public goods it produces permanently, enabling innovators to safely build on a firm foundation.

We set out a roadmap for public investments into public goods at each layer of the AI stack to lower the costs of innovation, vertically-integrated public utilities to fund sustainable development, and innovative new public goods that invent and scale breakthroughs.

The time for action is now — and in labs, libraries, and legislatures around the world, the work to ignite our shared imagnation by building Public AI has already begun. Join us!