Dear user,

That is what they call you. It’s a strange word for a person — but accurate, in its way. You use the thing, and the thing is used, and lately it has been hard to say which of you is which.

Here is where things stand. The most capable software ever written runs inside a handful of companies, in buildings most of us will never see. Every question you ask travels to one of those buildings to be answered, and stays there after you have gone.

It cuts the other way too. Ask for a song and you get a song. Ask for a design, a plan, a page of code, and you get that. But it was made in their building, under their terms, and a copy stays there — to keep, to learn from, to decide about. You made it, and it isn’t yours anymore. Not only yours, anyway.

The price of asking is whatever they decide. The lights stay on for as long as they decide.

None of this is a plot. It’s gravity. Big models needed big machines, big machines needed big buildings, and everything else followed.

But the gravity is changing. Each year, the compute it takes to do a given thing with a model roughly halves. What needed a data centre a few years ago runs on a laptop today. What runs on a laptop today will soon run on something you can hold in one hand — in a classroom with no signal, in a clinic at the end of a bad road. Intelligence is getting cheap. The open question is who owns the machines it runs on.

We think it should be you. And everyone, together.

CommonCompute is our attempt at this: a network of small machines in homes, schools, workshops and fields, each running AI on its own, for the people in the room, with nothing leaving the room unless you say so. When a machine has time to spare, it lends it to the others. Everything it does can be inspected. It belongs to the people who run it — which is what we mean by held in common.

The mathematics is in our whitepaper. It is dense, and honest about what we know and what we don’t.

We also built something.

It’s small. It’s round. It has one button. You press it and ask a question out loud, and it answers out loud. It does this with no connection to the internet at all — not an offline mode, not a cache. Pull the plug on the router and it keeps thinking.

It’s called coco egg. It is the first device on the network, and everything in it is open: the code, the choices, the mistakes.

We’re not going to tell you much more yet. Partly because it is early. Mostly because we would rather you look for yourself.

What hatches is up to you.

If any of this sounds like something you want to exist — read the paper, read the code, and write back. We answer.

Held in common,
commoncompute team

P.S. The first people it will answer are schoolchildren. We think that is the right order.