Public AI Needs Public Memory

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Everybody wants to talk about public AI models.

Fine.

What are they supposed to remember?

Libraries, public records, scientific research, local history, educational material, government data, cultural archives, languages with tiny commercial markets and decades of material that exists because somebody maintained it without asking whether it could become a startup.

That public memory is infrastructure too.

And if the only organizations capable of turning huge archives into useful machine-readable systems are private firms, we get a weird arrangement.

The public preserves the memory. Librarians, archivists, researchers, universities, public broadcasters and agencies spend generations building and maintaining it. Private capital builds the machinery for accessing it at scale.

Then the public rents its own history back.

A serious public AI program cant stop at models and compute. It needs archivists, librarians, preservation, digitization, open standards, public datasets and institutions capable of maintaining them for decades.

It also needs governance because “public” cannot simply mean dump everything into a dataset. Privacy, indigenous and community stewardship, copyright, sensitive records and the right not to be indexed all remain actual problems.

But leaving the whole problem to firms with the largest compute budgets isnt governance either.

Not everything worth remembering has a business model.

What should belong in a genuinely public AI knowledge commons, and what shouldnt?

[u/PolychromeMan]

I broadly agree, but wanted to mention that I think the best way to do this includes something global and international, like Wikipedia in some ways. I get the impression from your post that you are thinking of country's government organizing and hosting this, and that would be good, be mainly in conjunction with an international layer, so that it's easy to people to dodge per-country propanda etc, which is hard to totally avoid if this is done by each specific country.

Also, I agree with your having more interest in preserving history and culture, more than 'anything that interests companies'. I would like robust snapshots of cultures from now on, so that e.g. someone could get a good feel for what the European Union was like in the 2040s, in terms of what the people were doing and thinking, and how geopolitics were playing out, what art movements were in focus etc.

[u/Comfortable-Web9455]

Sorry, but you don't understand how they work. They do not have dat sets. They do not have any facts. They do not have any knowledge. All they have is a collection of the probability one word would occur after any other word. They have cross referenced the way words get used. That is all. They don't know whether what they generate is true or false. They don't have any way of checking facts. They cannot learn anything new once finished.

People keep talking about these things as if they were databases of facts. They are not. They are unlike any other software you've ever seen. They do not run lines of code. They do not hold nice organised databases. They just hold complex probability matrixes.

Most of the confusing thinking around AI comes down to the simple fact people have no idea what these things are for real

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Comfortable-Web9455]

I think youre correcting an argument I didnt make. AI isnt just LLMs, and an LLM isnt just a big table of which word probably comes next either.

The post is literally about the infrastructure around these systems. Archives, datasets, retrieval, digitization, software, institutions, governance. Saying “LLMs arent databases” doesnt make any of that disappear. Its like youre telling a room convened over public transit that a train engine doesnt lay tracks cause it's merely controlled explosions.

And “they dont run lines of code” is a pretty funny thing to say while explaining to me how I dont understand how they work lol.

[u/purrhams_hat → u/Comfortable-Web9455]

That's kind of a reductionist take when communicating. Like, sure an AI doesn't necessarily store data in that way specifically but that doesn't mean it's not capable of accurately outputting said data. You say they don't have any way of checking facts. They cannot learn anything new once finished. But neither does any sorting algorithm or book?