Public AI digital library

Samuel "SJ" Klein is a cofounder of the Public AI Network and a longtime Wikimedian, having served as a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation and as content director for One Laptop per Child. He is also a cofounder of Knowledge Futures Group, which builds platforms for community-owned publishing, and is affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard. His career has consistently centered on open knowledge infrastructure.

The Public AI Network, which Klein cofounded, frames AI as public infrastructure that should be provisioned like electricity, libraries, or the public internet: accessible, accountable, and constituted as a public good. The coalition's "moonshots" list includes an open-source large language model, a "library of Alexandria" of public training data, a CERN-scale public compute facility, and governance frameworks to sit above them. The Public AI Libraries project is a more concrete sub-effort that bundles AI tools for libraries and educational institutions.

The Cosmos grant, in the institute's $1K to $10K fast-grant range and announced December 17, 2024, funds Klein's scoping work on how a globally governed public digital library could be built in the era of generative models. The output is design and governance work rather than a single code artifact. It sits at the data and sovereignty-decentralization cross-layers: the project is upstream of training corpora, and the governance posture is an explicit alternative to centralized data accumulation by frontier labs.