Meta, IBM and others launch AI Alliance to drive open AI development

To counter the rapid development of AI by technology giants including Microsoft/OpenAI and Google, Meta and IBM along with a group of leading organizations across industry, startup, academia, research and government today launched the AI Alliance to drive open AI development. The AI Alliance will be working to build and support open technologies across software, models and tools, advocate developers and scientists to adopt open technologies and work with organizational and societal leaders, policy and regulatory bodies, and the public to drive open AI innovation. The Alliance also has plans to establish a governing board and technical oversight committee to set the overall project standards and guidelines.

Organizations part of AI Alliance:

The 50 Founding Members and Collaborators of AI Alliance include:

• Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)
• Aitomatic
• AMD
• Anyscale
• Cerebras
• CERN
• Cleveland Clinic
• Cornell University
• Dartmouth
• Dell Technologies
• Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
• ETH Zurich
• Fast.ai
• Fenrir, Inc.
• FPT Software
• Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Hugging Face
• IBM
• Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
• Imperial College London
• Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
• Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
• Intel
• Keio University
• LangChain
• LlamaIndex
• Linux Foundation
• Mass Open Cloud Alliance, operated by Boston University and Harvard
• Meta
• Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
• MLCommons
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• National Science Foundation
• New York University
• NumFOCUS
• OpenTeams
• Oracle
• Partnership on AI
• Quansight
• Red Hat
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Roadzen
• Sakana AI
• SB Intuitions
• ServiceNow
• Silo AI
• Simons Foundation
• Sony Group
• Stability AI
• Together AI
• TU Munich
• UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society
• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• The University of Notre Dame
• The University of Texas at Austin
• The University of Tokyo
• Yale University

AI Alliance will start or improve the projects to meet the following objectives:

• 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 catalog 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.

Google and OpenAI, two of the leading AI research organizations in the world, are at the forefront of developing and deploying generative AI models and systems. They have both made remarkable breakthroughs in creating large-scale and powerful generative AI models, such as GPT-4 and PaLM 2, that can generate diverse and coherent content across multiple modalities and domains. It will be interesting to see how the AI Alliance will drive the industry without support from OpenAI and Google.