Join the network.

Download the app. Choose what your machine does — chat, contribute, or both — and the network answers you back.

Download

Get Common for your computer.

One app, for macOS and Windows. Nothing else to install first — no terminal, no Python, no Node. Pick your device, and the app walks you through the rest the first time you open it.

Download for macOS · Apple Silicon

Common-mac-arm64.dmg

Checksums for every build: SHA256SUMS.txt

These are preview builds. Windows is unsigned and macOS is not notarised, so your computer will warn you the first time you open the app. That warning is expected — it tells you plainly who signed the build, and nobody has yet.

Read this before you download

Right now, this is a model-donation network.

You lend one machine running one model. When a request comes in, the gateway scores every healthy machine on the network and sends the request to the single best match. That machine answers alone. The response tells you which machine answered and why.

That is the whole of Alpha. It is real, it works, and it is the plumbing everything else has to be built on.

What it is not yet

It is not a network that combines answers. Composition — several specialists answering at once, checked for arithmetic, and synthesised into one answer — is built and ships in this release, but it is off by default. Our own experiments have not yet shown it beats the best single machine on the panel, so Alpha does not claim it and does not turn it on.

So do not expect flagship quality. You are talking to one small model chosen to fit your hardware — not a coordinated network of specialists out-reasoning GPT-class systems. That is the goal. It is not the state of things today.

The full honest status, including the experiments that failed and what we changed because of them, lives in the repository and in our findings.

early. honest. yours.

On first launch

The app measures your machine and asks what you want it to be: chat, contribute, or both. If you contribute, it installs Ollama and downloads a model that fits your memory — the guided version of what used to be typed into a terminal by hand.

What you can see

Every answer names the machine that produced it, how many candidates it was chosen from, and the margin it won by. If the network cannot compose, it tells you why it did not. The commons should be legible.

One machine, one node

The app and the terminal client share one node identity. Run both on the same machine at once and each overwrites the other's registration, so pick one. What you are joining is not a better answer yet — it is the infrastructure that makes a better answer possible without a gatekeeper.

Source

Common is open source and belongs to no one. The app is a client for the network, and both repositories are public — you can read every line of what you are about to run.

github.com/TheCommonAI/common-desktop →

Stuck?

Something not working, or your school or workplace blocking the download? Write to us. We read everything ourselves.

Get in touch →