Public Intelligence

TalkKevin Kelly, Venkatesh RaoApril 23, 2025

Kevin Kelly, Wired co-founder, presents his essay 'Public Intelligence,' arguing AI should be built as a commons like the internet or Wikipedia rather than owned by corporations or nations—combining public access, accountability, data (the 'omnipedia'), funding, and participation. In the Q&A moderated by Venkatesh Rao at a Bangkok town hall, Kelly argues decentralized AI will require corporate risk-taking to prove viability before being 'returned' to public commons, and identifies failure modes including fragmentation into competing sovereign national AIs and technical infeasibility of planetary-scale federated intelligence.

Topics

architecture-of-participation federateddecentralized-mixture-of-experts-ai governance omnipedia-public-training-data-library protocols public-ai-commons sovereign-ai-vs-global-public-intelligence technology town-hall

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