Why Open Source AI Should Be Not-for-Profit

The story told about Nvidia's success in the chipmaking space in the early 2000s is a facinating case study in business strategy. Nvidia's release of the proprietary CUDA software layer for their GPU hardware on the one hand helped bring graphic cards programming into the hands of a wider audience. On the other, it created a monopolistic grip on the GPU market, preparing itself for the AI boom that would follow.

Giving out GPUs to university labs for free, all the while holding exclusive rights to the software layer Nvidia's explosive AI-led growth in the last few years were powered by researchers who became dependent on the ecosystem.

Is it really "open"?

Everyone seems to have followed with zeal OpenAI's conversion from a nonprofit org to a Public Benefit Corporation. But people seem to have missed the politics of open source AI. Under the guise of openness, transparency, and "free" public good collaboration the open source AI community grew especially as some breakthrough projects such as Deepseek gained wide attention. But who owns it? What are their incentives? Why are these large profit-seeking corporations pushing open source?

A misalignment between contributors and beneficiaries

The vast majority of open source AI contributions have come from the academic community: the PhD students, the postdocs, academics and their labs. It is the natural and expected practice as being a member of the academic ecosystem to share and build upon one another's work. Just as peer-review and healthy transpareny scholarly debates have helped humanity progress in science for hundreds of years.

For a long time, this was a system built by and maintained primarily by non-profit organizations and institutions such as libraries, univeristies, research groups, academic conventions, and conferences. Can we say the same about AI in 2026? If the discourse of science is owned by a handful of private companies is science really open?

Towards actually nonprofit open AI, take 2 or 3?

We don't want to lose hope yet. The community can recreate a community of resources to serve the contributors and most important in the interest of humanity and science.

Project Clover is an initiative started by former Hugging Face researchers and academics who realized the limitations of a for-profit open source platform. We are a growing network of researchers and institutions committed to building an ecosystem that serves the needs of the AI community

Let's work towards a better future for open source!