The Open-Source AI Stack
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Walk the stack

Walk the stack

Bottom-up through the 10 core layers and 5 meta-layers, infrastructure to protocols. Each module ends with a Probe dialog, a Compare phase, a Why-Open question, and you writing your own synthesis. Sovereignty and Decentralization is the capstone where everything from prior modules comes together.

Begin module 01 · Infrastructure →
  1. 01 Infrastructure Data centers, power, cooling, and the grid that runs the rest of the stack.
  2. 02 Silicon Chips and ISAs that execute the math.
  3. 03 Compute Where silicon physically runs and gets accessed (scheduling, networking, batching).
  4. 04 Data Training corpora, open and closed.
  5. 05 Training Tools to pretrain and fine-tune.
  6. 06 Weights Model artifacts and their license tiers.
  7. 07 Evaluation Benchmarks, harnesses, leaderboards.
  8. 08 Governance Licensing, definitions, foundations, OSAID.
  9. 09 Runtime Inference engines that serve tokens from weights.
  10. 10 Identity and Trust TEEs, confidential computing, verifiable inference.
  11. 11 Retrieval and Memory Vector databases, embeddings, agent memory, RAG.
  12. 12 Agents Frameworks and agent products.
  13. 13 Safety and Guardrails Llama Guard, NeMo Guardrails, sandbox-escape evals.
  14. 14 Protocols MCP, A2A, agentic payments, the integration wire.
  15. 15 Sovereignty and Decentralization (Capstone) Assemble your own theory of why open AI matters; synthesize the threads from prior modules.