Root The bigger garden
AI is the first crop, not the whole garden.
Some of the most useful things in the world are free. Nobody owns them, volunteers build them, and donations keep them running.
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That is open source, and it quietly holds up a lot of the world.
Built in the open, for everyone
Open source means the work is shared: anyone can use it, study it, fix it and pass it on. It runs the web servers behind most websites, the phones in our pockets and the tools scientists use every day. A few of the projects everyone leans on:
OpenStreetMap
Started in the UK in 2004, because official maps weren’t free to use. Its founder got fed up with paying for maps and started a free one. Today volunteers map the whole world, and anyone can use the result.
Wikipedia
A free encyclopedia anyone can edit, online since 2001. It is run by a nonprofit and paid for mostly by small donations from its readers.
The Internet Archive
A nonprofit library, founded in 1996, that saves copies of the web through its Wayback Machine, along with books, music and film that would otherwise be lost.
Tor
Software that lets people use the internet without being tracked. It works because thousands of volunteers around the world run the relays that carry its traffic.
Free Linux systems like Debian reach millions of computers the same way: volunteers, universities and companies host mirror servers so anyone can download them.
The code is free. The machines it runs on are not.
Computing power isn’t free
Servers, bandwidth and graphics cards cost real money every month, and that bill decides how far a free project can go. How many people it can serve, how fast, and whether it can use AI at all.
The big corporations can buy all the computing they want. Free projects get by on what they’re given.
That gap is the thing we want to close.
Pool what we already own
Millions of capable graphics cards sit idle most of the day.
Pool them, and the open source world gains a shared machine bigger than any one project could ever afford. Root Compute wants to give back to the open source community and become part of it, lending computing power to the free projects everyone benefits from, so they can continue to hold their own among the big corporations.
Beyond AI, the same shared machine could serve:
- Climate modeling. So research groups aren’t waiting in line for time on someone else’s supercomputer.
- Open medicine. Like protein folding, where the results belong to everyone.
- Rendering for independent artists. For artists who can’t afford a commercial render farm.
Said plainly The projects named on this page are here to tell the story of open source. None of them is a partner of Root Compute or has endorsed it.
Shared compute can be public infrastructure, like roads and libraries: something we build once and all get to use.
Pooling computers is not a new idea
People have shared their computers for years, for niche interests and for the love of the craft. Root Compute stands on their shoulders.
Folding@home
Since 2000, home computers have helped scientists study how proteins fold. In 2020, so many people joined to help with COVID-19 research that it became the first computing project to pass an exaflop.
BOINC
Software from UC Berkeley, born out of SETI@home, that lets volunteers give their spare computer time to science projects of their choosing.
SheepIt
A free render farm for Blender artists, where everyone’s computers take turns rendering each other’s frames.
AI Horde
A volunteer network where people lend their graphics cards so anyone can generate images and text for free.
What’s different
Each of those projects serves its own corner: rendering, protein folding, volunteer science, or image and text generation.
Root Compute aims to build one global network that anyone can call on, at any time, for any job.