AI advancements are leading to new opportunities that can improve how we work, live, learn and interact with one another. Open and transparent innovation is essential to empower a broad spectrum of AI researchers, builders, and adopters with the information and tools needed to harness these advancements in ways that prioritize safety, diversity, economic opportunity and benefits to all.
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.
IBM and Meta have launched the AI Alliance, a group of leading organisations across industry, startup, academia, research and government coming together to support open innovation and open science in AI. The AI Alliance is action-oriented and decidedly international, designed to create opportunities everywhere through a diverse range of institutions that can shape the evolution of AI in ways that better reflect the needs and the complexity of our societies.
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 do that, the AI Alliance plans to start or enhance projects that 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 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.
The AI Alliance consists of a broad range of organisations across aspects of AI education, research, development and deployment, and governance. They are:
* The creators of the tooling driving AI benchmarking, trust and validation metrics and best practices, and application creation such as MLPerf, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, and open-source AI toolkits for explainability, privacy, adversarial robustness, and fairness evaluation.
* The universities and science agencies that educate and support generation after generation of AI scientists and engineers and push the frontiers of AI research through open science.
* The builders of the hardware and infrastructure that supports AI training and applications – from the needed GPUs to custom AI accelerators and cloud platforms;
* The champions of frameworks that drive platform software including PyTorch, Transformers, Diffusers, Kubernetes, Ray, Hugging Face Text generation inference and Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning.
* The creators of some of today’s most used open models including Llama2, Stable Diffusion, StarCoder, Bloom, and many others.
IBM and Meta has partnered with organisations in industry, government and academia to form the AI Alliance. Partners and collaborators 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; Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence; MLCommons; National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa); 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; and Yale University.
The AI Alliance will begin its work with the formation of member-driven working groups across all major topical areas. It will also establish a governing board and technical oversight committee dedicated to advancing the above project areas, as well as establishing overall project standards and guidelines.
In addition to bringing together leading developers, scientists, academics, students, and business leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, the AI Alliance will plan to partner with important existing initiatives from governments, non-profit and civil society organisations that are doing valuable and aligned work in the AI space.
Arvind Krishna, IBM chairman and CEO, comments: “The progress we continue to witness in AI is a testament to open innovation and collaboration across communities of creators, scientists, academics and business leaders. This is a pivotal moment in defining the future of AI. IBM is proud to partner with like-minded organizations through the AI Alliance to ensure this open ecosystem drives an innovative AI agenda underpinned by safety, accountability and scientific rigor.”
Nick Clegg, president: global affairs of Meta: “We believe it’s better when AI is developed openly – more people can access the benefits, build innovative products and work on safety. The AI Alliance brings together researchers, developers and companies to share tools and knowledge that can help us all make progress whether models are shared openly or not. We’re looking forward to working with partners to advance the state-of-the-art in AI and help everyone build responsibly.”