The People’s AI

Prompt: “A vast field on which the ground spells the letters A and I, with people on it, having a good time.” Via Copilot | Designer

People need their own AIs. Personally and collectively.

We won’t get them from Anthropic, Apple, Google, Meta, or Microsoft. Not even from Apple.

All of those companies will want to provide AIaaS: AI as a Service, rather than AI that’s yours alone. Or ours, collectively.

The People’s AI can only come from people. Since it will be made of code, it will come from open-source developers working for all of us, and not just for their employers—even if those employers are companies listed above.*

That’s how we got Linux, Apache, MySQL, Python, and countless other open-source code bases on which the digital world is now built from the ground up. Our common ground is open-source code, standards, and protocols.

The sum of business that happens atop that common ground is incalculably vast. It also owes to what we first started calling because effects twenty years ago at Bloggercon. That was when people were making a lot more money because of blogging than with blogging.

Right after that it also became clear that most of the money being made in the whole tech world was because of open-source code, standards, and protocols, rather than with them. (I wrote more about it here, here, and here.)

So, thanks to because effects, the most leveraged investments anyone can make today will be in developing open source code for The People’s AI.

That’s the AI each of us will have for our own, and that we can use both by ourselves and together as communities.

Those because investments will pay off on the with side as lavishly as investments in TCP/IP, HTTP, Linux, and countless other open-source efforts have delivered across the last three decades.

Only now they’ll pay off a lot faster. For all of us.

*See what I wrote for Linux Journal in 2006 about how IBM got clueful about paying kernel developers to work for the whole world and not just one company.