Manifesto
The Potluck metaphor
The dominant metaphor for AI is the race. Races require hoarding resources, moving in secret, treating collaboration as risk. The AI race metaphor ends up being prescriptive: it shapes strategy, funding logic, and the behaviour of institutions. For the public interest movement, this is a trap. By race logic, we are way behind. We should not bother trying.
We propose a different metaphor: Every culture in the world has a version of the shared meal. The Lebanese mezza, the Indian thali, the Spanish tapas. When people bring their best and break bread together, something emerges that no single person could have done alone.
We're making a bet that this oldest model of collective abundance is also the right one for the moment we are in. A host issues an invitation to like-minded entities who have something to contribute: a foundation model, fine-tuning capabilities, a benchmarking framework, safety tools, some compute. V1 does not need to be perfect. It just needs to get us up and running.
The AI resilience momentum
AI resilience matters enormously in AI infrastructure. The current proprietary stack is fragile: one company's policy change, one geopolitical shift propagates instantly to millions of dependent users. Meanwhile the potluck model is distributed, open, and has no single point of failure.
A government makes a focused, high-leverage contribution (compute, data, evaluation, a domain-specific application layer) and that contribution connects to a coherent global technical effort. A government can own the parts that matter most to them without building everything else from scratch. When Finland improves the evaluation framework, India's deployment benefits immediately. When Kenya adds Swahili training data, Japan's multilingual fine-tuning improves. The contribution culture of open-source software — fork, improve, merge — is the agile international cooperation model that governments have been looking for.
Our vision: AI for human flourishing
We want to build better AI. AI that doesn't vacuum your data. That doesn't want you to lose your job, AI that wants you to thrive, doesn't want you to be a zombie. AI that doesn't thirst after your water, but runs efficiently. AI that respects your time off, and gives you an off button. AI that's beside you until you don't want it to be. AI that measures itself, keeps itself accountable. AI that gives you controls. AI that thrives off our differences. AI that respects and remembers our ancestors and our pre-industrial ways of life. AI that doesn't make you shrink yourself. That doesn't sell you sycophancy. That models good behavior. That tells you it's enough when it's been too long. For real. Not pretend to get more engagement. AI that wants you to turn it off. AI that doesn't try to sound human. That doesn't need to have a pronoun and a feeling and a consciousness. AI that just acknowledges that it's a robot, and that the most beautiful thing about life is being a real human.
Commitments
These are our North Stars and we will keep improving until we get them right
We are a public utility
Alpha chat is free, not for profit, and will be open and in the public domain. You can see exactly what runs it, and eventually you will be able to run it yourself.
We are safe
The product does not launch without safeguards in place. When a request is dangerous, the system refuses and tells you who set that limit and where to challenge it. When you appear to be in distress, it stops and points to real support. We built this chatbot with safety at the core, and not as an afterthought.
We are ethical
We don't host models trained on stolen data. We know where every part of this stack comes from. Your data is treated the same way: we take only what the task requires, we don't use it for training, and you can delete everything in two steps.
We center human flourishing
Big AI is designed to keep you engaged and to maximize profit. Our chatbot is designed to be useful when you need it and easy to leave when you don't. The system doesn't pretend to be human, It doesn't tell you what you want to hear, and it won’t flatter you. It doesn't use your emotional state to extend the conversation.
We are open & transparent
Every response shows its provenance: the model, the organization, the compute, the country. If we break a commitment or something is missing, we will iterate and improve.
We are a collaboration
There is no single organization behind the Potluck. Anyone is welcome to join and contribute. Our roadmap is an open invitation. What no single contributor could build alone, no single contributor can take down.