AI Potluck is an open source project to build a vertically integrated AI product assembled entirely from open source components.
Starting July 2026 and over a 12-month sprint we will work with the global open source AI community to integrate the best tools and products and ship feature-by-feature until we have a viable alternative to proprietary AI that isn’t owned by any one company or country.
What we have
The open source AI stack map Over 24,626 projects, from foundation models through inference backends, were assessed for openness, capability, and adoption. The Gap Map helps us identify the blanks that need to be filled in, and collaborators to build with.
Where we start
Where we start
The demo An ethical chatbot prototype built -in just 8 weeks- with leading open-source contributors by integrating their AI tools and components. Alpha doesn't pretend to be human or optimize for engagement. It runs on public compute, is built with safety and consensual data at its core and its base model and pipeline are fully open.
Where we are going
Where we are going
A live view of the project A shared roadmap for our whole movement towards a fully open, auditable, vertically integrated public interest AI stack, from hardware to applications. It includes what the Potluck is building, what we are planning, and an open invitation to build with us.
The dominant metaphor for AI is the race, where someone is winning, someone is losing, and everyone is hoarding. We propose a different metaphor: a potluck, where individual excellence produces collective abundance, without a single chef, a single funder, or a single owner. The rules are simple: You bring your best. You don't 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. The resulting AI is resilient by design.
Builders obsessed with a better AI, governments worried about AI sovereignty, foundations committed to public interest tech. All of us believers in the power of open source as the surest way to build technology that is resilient, accessible and open.
Builders who have something in the stack: a foundation model, fine-tuning capabilities, a benchmarking framework, safety tools, some compute, funding. You bring it to the table and help us ship it.
Funders who have capital or resources to invest where there's a gap nobody in the coalition can fill.
We are looking for communities, developer networks, and user groups who want to help build and grow the public interest AI movement. If your community includes people who should be shaping public AI, we invite you to bring them to the table.
These are our North Stars and we will keep improving until we get them right.
Products are how tech reaches people. All of our worlds changed when a product- chatGPT- entered our lives. Launching a public interest AI product will demonstrate proof of existence. That a viable public option is possible despite the imbalance of resources and power. That the open-source movement is powerful and can do incredible things when it works together. That a different value system for AI — with safety, inclusion, and ethical practices at the root — is not just possible, but already here.
In the short term, a chatbot is something clearly defined and concrete to coordinate around. In the long term, it is a jumping-off point for a truly open, modular, and extensible public interest stack. It is a sandbox and a movement for a different kind of AI. We have barely scratched the surface of the Public Interest AI ecosystem. Around the world there are thousands of designers, UX researchers, behavioral psychologists, artists, business model experts, funders, who are not currently included in the conversation around building an alternative AI. We want to expand our space and sandbox to give them an entry point.
We evaluated the open-weight model landscape across five criteria: provenance integrity, openness of training pipeline, community and institutional governance, capability trajectory, and alignment with the stack's multilingual and sovereign requirements. Apertus is fully open (including an open model, full training pipeline, data, and methodology), is governed by non-profits (ETH and EPFL), and has a commitment to multilingualism and the public interest. It became the obvious foundation to build on
Current AI is the orchestrator and host for AI Potluck. Based in France, but with a global remit, Current AI is a non-profit and a first-of-its-kind global partnership of governments , philanthropies, industry leaders, and grassroots builders. With over $400 million already committed, we’re mobilizing $2.5 billion over five years. We have no side missions, no competing product line. Building the public interest AI stack is the only thing we do.
