AI Alliance launches as an international community of leading technology developers, researchers

Led by IBM and Meta, the AI Alliance brings together industry heavyweights such as Dell, Sony, AMD, Intel and several universities and AI startups.

• Meta and IBM have joined forces to establish the AI Alliance to promote an “open-science” approach to AI development, setting them apart from competitors such as Google, Microsoft and Open AI
• The Alliance 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

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.

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 Alliance will begin its work with the formation of member-driven working groups across all major topical areas listed above. The Alliance 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, the Alliance will plan to partner with important existing initiatives from governments, non-profit and civil society organizations who are doing valuable and aligned work in the AI space.

The 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 globally, according to eh alliance.

The  Alliance plans to start or enhance projects that meet the objectives like 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.

• It will also 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 besides fostering a vibrant AI hardware accelerator ecosystem by boosting contributions and adoption of essential enabling software technology.
• Other important focus areas include 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 and develop educational content and resources for the public 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, it said.

To ensure open innovation in AI benefits everyone and that it is built responsibly, the AI Alliance consists of a broad range of organizations that are working across aspects of AI education, research, development and deployment, and governance.

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.

While IBM and Meta joined hands to co-launch the AI Alliance with leading organizations across industry, government and academia others 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,, Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Imperial College London, IIT Mumbai, 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 AI, MLCommons, 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.

Commenting on this, Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO:

“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.”

(Narasimhan Kasthuri was a veteran journalist with The Hindu and Financial Express covering business, IT etc. Now, in the US West Coast, he covers technology for NE. He can be contacted at @narasimhan.kasturi@yahoo.com, Mobile: +1 (650) 793-0056)