Introducing Alpha v1

The AI Potluck launched on July 9 with a first milestone and work product: the MVP of Alpha Chat, an ethical chatbot built in 7 weeks entirely out of existing open source components.

The 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. And importantly, it allows you to look under the hood to understand how it works with its Stack X-Ray view.

We’re excited to launch alpha but we’re more excited about how it was made: 7 weeks and 10 partners who each contributed a building block to the stack: the model and compute from Switzerland, inference from Hugging Face, safety safeguards from a US non-profit, and benchmarks from MIT Media Lab AHA.

With AI Potluck and alpha chat we prove that if we all work together, a viable public option for AI is not only possible, but it’s already happening.

The aipotluck.org website includes a public roadmap grounded in what the Gap Map identifies as the highest-leverage gaps in the open source stack. Every item on the roadmap is an open invitation to builders who want to own a component, funders who want to back a specific gap, and connectors who want to bring communities into a particular piece of the work.

The Gap Map tells us what we have. The Alpha is where we are starting. The roadmap tells us where we are going.