AI x Multilateralism - Public AI: The New Multilateralism? - Jacob Taylor and Joshua Tan
This is AI x Multilateralism, a playlist of conversations at the Commons, where experts who help us unpack the many ideas and issues at the nexus of AI and international cooperation.
Today, the majority of AI development and deployment is controlled by a small number of powerful firms. If this path continues, the next generation of digital infrastructure underpinning our societies will be privately owned and unaccountable to the public interest.
Is there another way, one where where AI serves the common good? In this episode, Jacob Taylor (Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Sustainable Development and a 2025 Public AI Fellow) and Joshua Tan (Co-Founder and Research Director at Metagov) make the case for Public AI: shared, open AI infrastructure (much like highways, electricity grids, and public broadcasting), that is publicly responsible and harnessed to solve collective problems.
Drawing on their article Public AI is the New Multilateralism and Metagov's Public AI White Paper, they argue that building public AI infrastructure can become a new form of multilateralism, where states, academia and civil society co‑create accessible, accountable AI systems that can be shared and re-purposed to meet a range of local, regional and global needs.
Resources mentioned:
- The Public AI Inference Utility - publicai.co
- Public AI - https://publicai.network/