Whoever owns artificial intelligence owns the future.
So why is humanity’s future in the hands of private companies?
That’s the key question raised in a new piece from The Guardian, echoing a bold but simple idea: the large language models (LLMs) that power modern #AI should be publicly owned.
Not just in theory. Like utilities. Built, funded, and monitored by independent institutions—accessible to everyone. Why? Because when just a handful of tech giants control them, they control what we know, how we work, and what kind of society we build.
LLMs from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic aren’t just fancy software.
They absorb massive amounts of data, then reshape and spit it back out—content, answers, even decisions. And they do this based on training that’s completely opaque, with datasets we’ll never see, and zero democratic oversight. Whoever builds them decides what gets emphasized, what gets left out, and how visible different ideas are in our digital world.
The proposal, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, isn’t idealistic. It’s strategic.
They say LLMs should be treated like electricity or clean water—public infrastructure that no one in their right mind would leave to an unregulated monopoly. So why do it with AI?
Skeptics say public models would be too expensive. That governments can’t compete.
But… the internet? GPS? Wi-Fi? All born from public investment.
This isn’t a tech issue. It’s a political one.
What do you think?
Read the full article here: