Potluck AI

We think the people who use AI should own a piece of it.

Right now, the most powerful technology of our lifetimes is being built by a handful of companies, in a handful of buildings, for a handful of shareholders. The rest of us get a login page, a monthly bill, and a quiet agreement that our questions, our writing, and our thinking are fair game for someone else's business model.

That is not the only way this can go.

What we are building

Potluck AI is a member-owned AI cooperative. Think REI, not OpenAI. A rural electric co-op, but for intelligence instead of electricity. Or, well, a potluck: everyone brings what they can, everyone eats, and nobody leaves hungry because they could not afford to host alone.

Your AI runs on your device. We ship a polished app that installs strong open-source models locally. No prompt logging. No training on you. No ads. The conversations you have with your AI stay on your computer unless you explicitly choose otherwise.

When you need something bigger, the community has your back. A college student on a Chromebook should not be locked out of powerful AI because they cannot afford $200 a month. So members with idle gaming PCs, workstations, and Apple Silicon Macs can opt in to contribute spare compute when they are not using it. Over time, that shared capacity helps deliver stronger models and better access to the people who need it.

Here is the honest version of how the network protects you. When you route a prompt to the community, a randomly chosen member's machine answers it. The routing is blinded — the contributor does not know the request is yours. The software they run is open-source, verified at startup, and designed so your prompt never touches disk; it lives in memory only long enough to generate an answer, then goes away. Contributors sign a code of conduct when they join; breaking it costs them their membership and any credits they have earned. That is not cryptographic magic — real private inference is on our roadmap as the technology matures — but it is an honest version of privacy a cooperative can deliver today: a verified member processing a request anonymously under policy, instead of a for-profit company logging it forever. And if you prefer, you can stay local-only and never touch the network at all.

Contributors earn rewards, not control. The person whose 4090 sat idle all night helping other members deserves something for it. Credits, discounted access, and eventually cash payouts should be tied to real work done, not speculation. But compute should not buy political power. This is a co-op, not a marketplace where the richest member gets the loudest voice.

Members govern it. One member, one vote. Members help decide which models we support, which product priorities come next, what privacy standards we uphold, and where the surplus goes. The charter is public. The books should be transparent. Wherever possible, the technology should stay open enough that if we ever stop being worth it, you can leave with your setup intact.

How this is different

There are token networks, GPU marketplaces, open-source communities, and venture-backed AI labs. Some are interesting. Some are useful. None of them are the thing we are trying to build.

We are building a legally structured, member-owned institution with one-member-one-vote governance that happens to ship local-first AI software. The institution comes first. The product exists to serve the members, not the other way around.

Concretely, that means four things under one roof, accountable to the same members: AI that runs on your own device, a memory layer that travels with you across the tools you already use, a contributor network that puts community compute behind larger models, and a governance structure that decides where any of it goes next. Plenty of organizations do one of those. None of them do all four, and none of them do it as a co-op.

Why this, why now

Three things frighten people about AI right now, and all three are real.

Jobs get automated away and the value flows up. A co-op cannot stop automation, but it can make sure that when AI becomes part of daily work, some of the value belongs to the people who actually use it.

Surveillance gets normalized. Every prompt you type into a hosted chatbot can become a data point. Local-first AI is the clearest answer to that, and the models are finally good enough to make it practical.

AI gets pointed at things we would never sign off on — ad targeting, military targeting, political targeting — with no real say from the people it affects. A co-op with tens of thousands of members is a voice. A million is a constituency. That is how ordinary people stop being spectators.

We do not think we are going to beat frontier models on a benchmark. We are not trying to. We are trying to build a dignified, durable, member-owned piece of the AI landscape for the people who want one.

What we are not

We are not a crypto project. We are not promising you will get rich. We are not claiming we will train a frontier model next year on volunteer laptops; the networking physics do not work yet, and we would rather be honest than hype.

We are not a charity, either. Members pay dues, contributors earn rewards, and the whole thing should sustain itself on real value or it does not deserve to exist.

We are not anti-AI. We love this technology. We just think more than five companies should get to decide what it becomes.

What we believe

1. AI should work for the people who use it, not the other way around.
2. Privacy is a feature, not a premium tier.
3. Access should not be gated by a $200 monthly subscription.
4. Ownership and governance belong with members, not shareholders.
5. Contributions deserve rewards, but rewards should not buy power.
6. Honesty about what we can and cannot do is worth more than hype.

What we need

We need the first hundred people.

People who will pay a founding-member fee because they want this to exist, not because the product is finished. People with idle GPUs willing to help test the earliest version of a shared network. Lawyers who care about co-op structures. Designers who would rather ship a beautiful app for a small cause than a mediocre one for a big company. Moderators, writers, skeptics, critics.

If you are reading this and something in your chest said yes, come build it.

Reach out. Sign up. Tell a friend. Pull up a chair. This only works if we do it together, which is the whole point.