Anyone working in AI today knows there’s a ton at stake as we build what comes next. Governments, builders, and everyday users are clamoring for a vision of AI where our future isn’t controlled by any one company or country. Some call it sovereign AI, others call it an AI alternative, or open source AI. Whatever the name, we know that true technological sovereignty and resilience come through transparency, open collaboration, and resource sharing, and not through competition, isolation, or profiteering. This is why Current AI exists: to convene a partnership of leaders and grassroots builders to reorient AI in service of people over profit.
Right now the public-interest AI movement has both a problem and an opportunity: we have more talent and institutional goodwill than ever before. And yet, we are generating most of that momentum in silos. Hundreds of builders and organizations are pursuing similar missions, approaching the same funders, and having the same conversations, without strategic alignment. This is because two critical ingredients have been missing: a way to bridge our efforts, and an invitation to collaborate on a shared vision for what’s possible.
Introducing the AI Potluck
The dominant metaphor for AI is the race. Sadly, this approach has locked many of us into a prescriptive narrative around our work, shaping individual strategies, funding logic, and the behavior of our organizations. But for the public-interest movement to gain true momentum, we need to see ourselves as collaborators and co-conspirators, not as competitors.
Today we’re proposing a new metaphor for AI: the potluck. Every culture has a version of the shared meal, from Lebanese mezza to Spanish tapas. When people bring their best contribution to the table and break bread together, what emerges inevitably becomes a plentiful, nourishing meal. With this in mind, the potluck is our proposed approach to launching v1 of an integrated public-interest AI stack.
Why the Potluck Works
A potluck is a system in which individual excellence produces collective abundance, without a single chef, funder, or owner. The rules are simple: You bring your best, and try not to bring what someone else is already bringing. You don't hold back a secret ingredient. And critically: no single guest can ruin the meal by withdrawing, because if the pasta doesn't show, someone passes more bread. The potluck is resilient by design, which matters enormously in AI infrastructure—in fact, it’s our secret ingredient. Proprietary stacks are fragile because one company's policy change, or one geopolitical shift, can instantly affect millions of dependent users. Meanwhile, the potluck model is distributed, open, and has no single point of failure.
With this in mind, we invite aligned builders to bring your best contributions forward. This could be a foundation model, fine-tuning capabilities, a benchmarking framework, safety tools, or some compute. Combined, we believe we’ll have enough components for a v1 public-interest AI stack. And of course, the potluck is a recurring invitation. V1 does not need to be perfect, it just needs to get us up and running.
Setting the Table for a Collective Roadmap
At Current AI, our job is to make sure the table is set and the right people are at it. If there are crucial gaps in the stack, we will work to fill them. We’ll also ensure that the right conversations are happening to create connective tissue between ecosystem partners. Ultimately, we don't think we need to match the frontier labs on every benchmark. Instead, we need to be close enough that the cost-governance-sovereignty tradeoff lands clearly in favor of the open stack for the use cases that matter. Then together, we can aim even higher.
We’ve Already Started Cooking
The public-interest AI ecosystem already has the talent, resources, and building blocks to do this work, and an MVP is underway.
Your Invitation: the Gap Map
On July 1 we launched the Open Source AI Gap Map, a tool we developed to make the open source ecosystem more coherent by showing what exists now, as well as what’s missing. Building on work from leading open source AI experts at the Columbia Convening, MOF, Hugging Face, and others, we evaluated 24,626 projects across openness, capability, and adoption. The Gap Map is a tool we can all use to strategically plan our contributions to the public-interest AI stack. Read more.
Our First Potluck Contribution: Alpha Chat
On July 9, we launched a no-login AI chat interface that works on web and mobile. It’s built from open source ingredients, and is free of the dangerous dark patterns that compromise users’ safety and privacy. It’s also built using a base model trained on consensual data with a fully open pipeline. To create Alpha Chat, Current AI brought one new element: orchestration. Everything else already existed, and was open for us to build with. Overall, the goal of Alpha Chat is narrative breakthrough: proof that a fully open source, sovereign, community-configured AI is already possible. The Alpha is available on the AI Potluck website. Try it out.
Together, the Gap Map and Alpha Chat prove that we already have a viable public option, despite the imbalance of resources and power. It also shows that AI does not have to rest on labor extraction, cultural flattening, or the pursuit of bigger-at-all-cost profits. There is an alternative way.
What Success Looks Like
We aim to have a working prototype of a fully integrated public-interest AI stack, built in collaboration with a global community, by June of 2027. Think of it as a public AI assistant built on sovereign, open source infrastructure, with provenance and governance baked in from day one.
We have two additional goals:
- The prototype must be easy to use, vertically integrated, and feel like a real alternative for real users.
- It should demonstrate what’s possible when the public-interest AI community actually works together.
For each goal, we'll develop success metrics with core contributors and partners (for example, a target number of AI startups using the public-interest stack as their primary infrastructure; a minimum number of civil society organizations, public agencies, and NGOs using it to build AI for the people they serve, etc). By next year at this time, we want the public-interest AI stack to be so legible and well-resourced that the next institution looking to act finds our community as the first, obvious port of call.
Right now, the full roadmap lives at aipotluck.org. It is an open invitation, so if you see a gap you can fill, that’s where to start.
We’re Looking for Core Contributors
If you’re a builder, funder, or leader inspired by this movement, we’d love for you to join us as a core contributor. Here’s how to get more involved:
- Build. If your organization has compute, data, a model, or a capability the stack is missing, use our Gap Map to explore where your expertise aligns with our identified points of highest leverage. The components marked "wanted" are open invitations, so raise your hand or request API access, and start building.
- Fund. If you govern or allocate capital, this is infrastructure your citizens could own. A focused contribution to the Potluck connects to a global effort.
- Connect. If you are connected to communities, developer networks, or user groups who want to help grow the public-interest AI movement, we’d love your help.
If none of those is you yet: use Alpha Chat. See what public-interest AI feels like, give us feedback, and pass it on.