It does not include any of the best-known names (so far) in AI but has some stellar brain power
IBM and Meta have formed the AI Alliance with the support of more than 50 founding members and collaborators, including AMD, CERN, Dell Technologies, Intel, the Linux Foundation, Oracle, Red Hat and ServiceNow. The full list is here.
The motivation for forming the Alliance, according to members, is that, While there are many individual companies, start-ups, researchers, governments, and others who are committed to open science and open technologies and want to participate in the new wave of AI innovation, more collaboration and information sharing will help the community innovate faster and more inclusively, and identify specific risks and mitigate those risks before putting a product into the world.”
Open community
The statement continues, “The AI Alliance is focused on fostering an open community and enabling developers and researchers to accelerate responsible innovation in AI while ensuring scientific rigor, trust, safety, security, diversity and economic competitiveness.
“By bringing together leading developers, scientists, academic institutions, companies, and other innovators, we will pool resources and knowledge to address safety concerns while providing a platform for sharing and developing solutions that fit the needs of researchers, developers, and adopters around the world.’
To achieve these goals, the Alliance plans to start or augment projects that aim to:
- Develop and deploy benchmarks and evaluation standards, tools, and other resources that enable the responsible development and use of AI systems at global scale, including the creation of a catalogue of vetted safety, security and trust tools. Support the advocacy and enablement of these tools with the developer community for model and application development.
- Responsibly advance the ecosystem of open foundation models with diverse modalities, including highly capable multilingual, multi-modal, and science models that can help address society-wide challenges in climate, education, and beyond.
- Foster a vibrant AI hardware accelerator ecosystem by boosting contributions and adoption of essential enabling software technology.
- Support global AI skills building and exploratory research. Engage the academic community to support researchers and students to learn and contribute to essential AI model and tool research projects.
- Develop educational content and resources to inform the public discourse and policymakers on benefits, risks, solutions and precision regulation for AI.
- Launch initiatives that encourage open development of AI in safe and beneficial ways, and host events to explore AI use cases and showcase how Alliance members are using open technology in AI responsibly and for good.
Speed versus safety?
There is an old saying that if you want to travel fast, travel alone. If you want to travel far and safely, travel with companions. AI is a long game. It will be interesting to see how well this open-source approach fares.