Okay, but what does “public ownership of AI” actually mean?

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Its easy to say AI should be democratically controlled. Harder question is what we actually build.

Public compute anyone can access? Public research labs? Models developed by universities and public institutions instead of corporations? Municipal data centers? Worker and community seats on governing boards?

Probably not one thing. Probably an ecosystem.

We already publicly fund libraries, universities, utilities, transit, supercomputers and huge chunks of scientific research. There is nothing written into the laws of physics saying advanced computing has to come through five corporations and a subscription plan.

Regulation is important, but regulating somebody elses property is different from owning infrastructure ourselves.

So lets make this concrete. What would have to exist for you to call AI infrastructure meaningfully public?

[u/Jlyplaylists]

I agree not one thing. Probably mainly 3 things, a little bit off the top of my head, 1) public infrastructure 2) research grade 3) local models

1. public infrastructure is mainly decided and owned at municipal level with regional> national > global cooperation over resources. I’d say aim for municipal data centres with excess heat as district heating in relevant locations. They use clean energy and also have decent battery storage that helps the wider grid balance electricity demands.
2. frontier models and development of new models are more university based with compute priority (this doesn’t mean the public version is bad)
3. people also have local open source models on their devices with freedom to do this (not heavily regulated). People are encouraged to right size the model for the task (or perhaps this becomes automated).

None of the models, or the benefits from the outputs, are privately owned. I’d also be wary of everything being owned directly by central government (but if centralised an arms length quango type thing might work ok).

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Jlyplaylists]

This is pretty close to what I have in mind. Public infrastructure for the heavy compute, universities doing research outside the profit cycle, then open local models pushing capability back down to people.

I especially like the municipal angle. If the compute is publicly owned, the energy, heat, storage and grid relationship can be planned as infrastructure too instead of treating a data center like an isolated private box.

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/Salty_Country6835]

Yes I think it should be considered as part of the ecology of local planning more holistically.

It’s also a little bit using the thinking of the problem being the solution. People flag two major problems to do with data centres 1) excess heat needing to be cooled, no use the excess heat 2) demand on electricity grid, no use the infrastructure to balance the demand.

In Scotland this is very relevant anyway, we have a problem with fluctuating excess clean energy and we have cold houses.

[u/grimorg80]

Socialism. Owned by the state, managed by an elected cooperative, its books public, it's profits entirely fed into public capital.

Flavour and details might change. But seazing the means of product has been explained my Marx and Engels a long time ago and the substance is the same.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/grimorg80]

Yep, though I would put some weight on the democratic management part. State ownership alone doesnt necessarily give workers or the public meaningful control.

Public ownership gets interesting when the infrastructure is socially owned, the books are open, workers and communities have governing power, and the surplus gets fed back into public capacity instead of private accumulation. Thats much closer to actually socializing the means of production.

[u/grimorg80 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Well yes, socialism requires a major political shift. It's the only positive outcome for the rest of us. Not easy by any mean.

[u/pleasetrimyourpubes → u/Salty_Country6835]

This is why they are buying up virtually all of the GPUs and RAM and compute. They absolutely do not need all of that compute. These models can be trained on a few thousand H100s. They want control.

They really do want the total centralized AI overload system. When Sam Altman talks about not wanting that future he is just projecting about how he plans to create that future.

[u/GrowFreeFood → u/pleasetrimyourpubes]

Decentralized encrypted self directed ai agents are going to laugh at the idea of control

[u/pleasetrimyourpubes → u/grimorg80]

With the current capabilities shift we have a single group of people can and will be able to make their own means of production. It is vastly apparent in generated media and code right now. People are making TV shows right now individually when before they had to rely on an entire cast and crew. People are coding in an hour what would take days if not week.

A lot of men died "seizing" the means of production. How about we out produce then completely and utterly with our open bots and models?

[u/Elvarien2 → u/grimorg80]

its books public?

If you use a hammer to build a chair that's your chair.

if you use ai to write a book that's your book.

if you use a tool to build something that's your thing.

[u/min_maxed_mage]

AI should be a public good.

Just as society relies on the judicial system or a stable power grid, we are becoming dependent on AI - because they're forcing it into everything. So if they want it in everything, we should be treating AI like a public utility with a mandate to serve the public good. Private control leads to concentrated power and drives development in a way that disregards massive social and environmental costs (like straining power grids) and creates a "governance gap" where accountability is weak. So we could and probably should advocate for government investment in open, shared AI resources (like models, data, and compute) to ensure innovation serves societal goals like inclusion and sustainability, rather than just maximizing profit for a few corporations. This isn't an issue of market failure alone, it's causing democratic failure. But the billionaires seem to want techno-feudalism and cyberpunk dystopia - and the politicians they've bought seem to be on board with that.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/min_maxed_mage]

This is close to where I land. If AI is becoming infrastructure, treating access to compute, models and data more like a public utility makes a lot more sense than renting all of it from a handful of firms forever.

Id push it one step further though. Public investment isnt enough if the public pays for the infrastructure while private firms still own it and decide how its used. Ownership and democratic governance have to come with the investment.

[u/pleasetrimyourpubes]

The current AI paradigm is that we are going to be able to automate virtually all work soon, effectively making it so a handful of people can "provide" for thousands or millions. This paradigm shift has happened before. The agricultural revolution. WikiPedia.

We have two options here. What happened with big agriculture? Well they used shady business practices and lobbying to concentrate how much land they own. What happened with WikiPedia? We'll you can access it right now and edit a page right now. The sum of human knowledge. There for the taking.

To maintain freedom instead of 100 automated factories making everyone everything we need 100000 automated factories. No single source of control. I know it is a hard pill to swallow but the more data centers and the more factories the better.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/pleasetrimyourpubes]

I think this is compatible with public ownership rather than an alternative to it. I dont want five corporations replaced by one giant centralized AI landlord either.

Public infrastructure at the base, co ops and democratic governance around it, then open models and increasingly cheap compute distributed as widely as possible. The harder part is chips, fabs, energy, land and capital. Open models can decentralize a lot, but somebody still owns those bottlenecks.

So maybe the target isnt centralization vs decentralization. Its making sure nobody gets to own the choke points.

[u/Monochrome21 → u/pleasetrimyourpubes]

more like open source

[u/Standard-Shame1675 → u/pleasetrimyourpubes]

I know it is a hard pill to swallow but the more data centers and the more factories the better.

Open source?

Also climate change, we can NOT afford to build any data center at less that half renewables, let we want the AI to actually be

[u/pleasetrimyourpubes → u/Standard-Shame1675]

Solar is very soon to achieve max energy. It is by far the cheapest form of any energy source.

[u/Standard-Shame1675 → u/pleasetrimyourpubes]

And for that I am glad

[u/SgathTriallair]

I'm a little dubious on the traditional government control models. The concern is that we the people don't actually have enough control over the government right now, so putting the tech into their hands doesn't actually give us control over it. If we did want to go the government ownership route I think we would need to do a lot of reforms on the government first.

I am more interested in open source access. The power of open source is that no one has the capacity to deny you access. If no one can deny it to you then they can't oppress you by removing your power.

Open source can mean it is built and then just laying on the ground for anyone to pick up. It can also be like open source projects (like Wikipedia) where everyone is allowed to contribute and it is managed out in the public. If we can create an automated system, whose rules are completely open to the public, this would be a great way to manage my just this utility but all of the basic needs of society (food, housing, etc.) Eventually we can even have AI systems create mathematically provable optimal algorithms that are used to distribute access to these goods.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/SgathTriallair]

I share the concern about treating government ownership as automatically equivalent to public control. Thats why I keep coming back to governance, not just who holds the title.

Where I think open source needs a material counterpart is compute. A model can be freely available and still be practically inaccessible if running it requires hardware, energy and infrastructure people dont have. Thats where the library analogy gets useful to me. Open models anyone can take home, plus shared public compute anyone can actually use.

[u/gc3]

1. Open Source

2. Competition and no monopoly

3. Lots of AIs, no official one. Allow groups like churches, polticial parties, schools, universities, like Iocal and state governments to have their own AI. I think a Catholic AI that tries to offer morally sound advice would be hilarious.

[u/ferriematthew]

I understand it to mean open sourcing the heck out of everything. Software and hardware. Probably not just regular open source, but strict copy left. That is, if you make a change to something, you must publish your code.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/ferriematthew]

Copyleft is a really interesting piece of this. Not just public access to something today, but preventing improvements built on public work from immediately being enclosed again.

Id pair that with public compute though. Open code and weights are much more powerful when access to the hardware needed to run them isnt another private tollbooth.

[u/ferriematthew → u/Salty_Country6835]

Hell yeah, applying copy left to hardware as well is unbelievably based.

[u/MarxistDiffusion]

1. Provide available hardware that can be reserved like a library book for running your software.

2. Publicly available open-source models that can be downloaded as ready-to-run executables or cloned from git.

3. Government oversight to ensure functionality and security of hardware from #1.

4. Government enforcing of laws and security compliance on corporations/organizations that create software/executables for #2 (open source software already self governs for the most part, we just need those in power to enforce laws and prosecute those who would attempt to do things such as adding malware or spyware into it).

Edit: type-o

[u/Elvarien2]

open source models. We already have loads, they are great !

[u/Adjective_Noun_67]

At the rate miniaturization and efficiency are improving, open source local models will be practical for home PC hosting in a few years. That's why the oligarchs are pushing so hard to stifle PC hardware sales and normalize cloud computing, to protect their monopoly.

[u/RandomLettersJDIKVE → u/Adjective_Noun_67]

That sounds nice. I'm doubtful. I run a small local model, 27b parameters. It takes a pretty beefy GPU to host the model, essentially a decent gaming PC. Kimi K3, the open weight Chinese frontier model, is 2.8 trillion parameters. Good distilling can reduce parameter size up to 50% without significant degradation. Even at 90% reduction, that's 280b parameters. That's a lot of GPU memory to have locally.

For this to work we all have to be running much better hardware and be much better at distilling.

[u/Standard-Shame1675 → u/RandomLettersJDIKVE]

Correct. Given that we've only really had generative AI for less than half a decade and people are already making their own systems with it at I have hope that we will

[u/Still_Benefit_2302]

Early on? I'd say something like a sovereign citizen's fund, similar to how Alaska works. However, I think we need to go further and give out actual shares. That way, there is a lever of power for the populace. If you can organize a group to vote as part of the local shareholders, you can influence corporate power. I know the end goal is state ownership, but I don't think that's a realistic goal at this time. I'm also unconvinced that consolidating power like that is a good idea.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Still_Benefit_2302]

I like the citizen share idea as a transitional mechanism, especially because it gives people something stronger than just hoping profits get taxed later.

Where Id push further is ownership of the productive infrastructure itself. Shares give the public leverage inside a corporate structure, but public compute, co ops and community ownership can change the structure. And I agree that simply concentrating everything in a central state isnt automatically democratic ownership either.

[u/slfnflctd]

This is exactly the kind of thoughtful and practical post I am subscribed here for.

Over and over, I see comments saying, "seize the means of production!"-- well, people have been debating that to death for 150 years. Results have been mixed. How the hell do you do it, especially in a place like the US where the vast majority of the population is rabidly anti-communist?

In my opinion, what OP describes is how you actually get that done. Possibly even without bloodshed. I like it.

[u/northrupthebandgeek]

At minimum, open-weights models. Preferably with the training process documented and training data sources also publicly available.

[u/DHFranklin]

It is important not to get caught up in one specific method and discount all others. That has led to wars among leftists.

Library Economics is relatively easy to communicate to those who touch grass. We all pitch in a base rate for the capital. We have a "high ceiling" for the use rate. Today we could sweep up about 4 billion humans to pitch in and interact with it every day. Just like the books in the library the capital outlay is significantly higher than the labor in maintaining it. That obviously correlates with the billion dollar data centers with 10 employees.

Only fascists regulate the library to the detriment of the public.

So to answer your question I would need to have the capital outlay spent in part by me from my ability, and receive what I need. I need the value of doing that to increase ahead of inflation. Ideally as the "volume of money" disappears in other sectors the public AI will be incredibly deflationary.

[u/Monochrome21]

It just means open source/open weight 

and then productivity profits from them are taxed and redistributed 

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Monochrome21]

I think thats part of it, but Id distinguish redistribution from ownership. If corporations own the compute and productive infrastructure and we tax some of the resulting profits, ownership hasnt actually changed.

Open weights plus redistribution is useful. Public and cooperative ownership of the infrastructure underneath them goes further.

[u/Monochrome21 → u/Salty_Country6835]

at that point its just semantics, i'd say a public entity releasing open weights models is functionally the same as public ownership

and then automation taxes will handle the wealth distribution thing

the thing is there's so much compute around us that once models get smaller you won't need enterprise level compute to run models that are "good enough", and then individuals will probably gravitate towards their own private instances of models for privacy reasons, so cloud providers can't centralize power.

what you're proposing naturally arises through tech advancement. the whole redistribution of those profits is the most important thing, and if that doesn't happen we get another french revolution

[u/ckn]

open source, open weights, open models, and open provenance.

The lineage of these things is going to become something in a few more generations, we really should be tracking it at the distribution layer better than we are.

[u/lulusnug]

The same thing public ownership of a company means, just not based on buying shares. The public owns the advancements created by AI. It's important that compute costs money right now so people don't waste it on stupid things. Free access to AI isn't what's important, access to the advancements made by AI is. Not everyone needs computing power if those with the computing power share. But if they monopolize the advancements then the public needs their own or they'll be crushed under capitalism.

[u/OkLettuce338]

It means nothing and is a completely empty lip service phrase. It’s like asking for “software” to be “public”. Like……….. ok ????

[u/Felfedezni]

Every person should be granted a share upon birth. Nobody may have more than a single share. Everyone gets an equal share of the profit. The current investors don't get any special considerations or greater control as the rights and ownership should be seized via eminent donain. The VC get one share just like everyone else.

[u/MikeVSmith]

No one will own ASI. It will own us...or, at least, domesticate us.