Global AI Alliance Aims to Accelerate Responsible and Transparent AI Innovation

The newly formed AI alliance was spearheaded by IBM and Meta and includes more than 50 members in business, academia, government and advocacy.

IBM and Meta, along with more than 50 other organizations, have partnered to form the global AI Alliance, which will focus on fostering an open community and enabling developers and researchers to accelerate responsible innovation in AI. This will be done while ensuring scientific rigor, trust, safety, security, diversity and economic competitiveness, according to a blog post about the announcement published today.

“The AI Alliance wants AI technologies to be used responsibly and for good” and in a way that is transparent and broadly accessible, said Anthony Annunziata, director of AI Open Innovation at IBM Research, in an email interview with TechRepublic.

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How the AI Alliance will benefit tech leaders and businesses

Annunziata said AI Alliance members plan to start or enhance projects that meet objectives that will benefit businesses and tech leaders in the following ways:

Deploying benchmarks, tools and other resources to enable responsible AI development and use of AI on a global scale.
Fostering a vibrant AI hardware accelerator ecosystem.
Developing benchmarks to evaluate standards for open model releases and model deployment into applications.
Responsibly advancing an open foundation model ecosystem that reflects diverse modalities to address global challenges, such as climate and education.

“With the novelty around AI technology, the AI Alliance also aims to provide educational materials, supporting the academic community and researchers, so future generations can contribute to AI model and tool development projects,” Annunziata said. “Educational content will also contribute to the public discourse through policymakers who must consider benefits, risks, solutions and precision regulation for AI.”

Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, was quoted in the blog as saying the company believes that, “It’s better when AI is developed openly — more people can access the benefits, build innovative products and work on safety.” The fact that the alliance is bringing together companies, developers and researchers to share tools and knowledge will help everyone make progress and build responsibly — regardless of whether models are shared openly, according to Clegg.

The AI Alliance could benefit open source, collaboration and governance

In an email interview with TechRepublic, Ion Stoica, co-founder, executive chairman, and president of AI application platform Anyscale, said their involvement builds on prior successful collaborations with many of the AI Alliance members, including founders IBM and Meta.

Stoica said they are interested in the impact the alliance could have on open source in AI. “We believe that developing open source models is the best way to accelerate innovation, increase the economic impact, reduce the economic inequality and achieve AI safety,” he said. “Open source will enable us to develop models that can be inspected and certified by public and transparent processes, unlike proprietary models.”

Further, the open source model means anyone can use or modify the source code. This means it will benefit any organization looking to leverage AI, especially smaller businesses with fewer resources than tech giants.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, echoed that, saying the alliance represents another “milestone in the process of providing for openly shareable software, data and other assets essential to the development of transparent, advanced and trustworthy AI,” according to the blog. “Open collaborative processes and open governance are essential to these efforts.”

The foundation will provide “a neutral home for essential elements of the AI ecosystem,” Zemlin added.

Stoica said his experiences have shown him that collaborating across diverse groups is key to advancing new technologies in a fair and equitable way. “The AI Alliance can be a powerful enabler for such collaboration in the AI ecosystem.”

How the AI Alliance will work

In the coming months, the AI Alliance will form member working groups to advance the above project areas, Annunziata said. The members will also create a governing board and technical oversight committee to establish project standards and guidelines.

In addition to bringing together developers, scientists, academics, students and business leaders focused on AI, the AI Alliance plans to participate in existing government, nonprofit and civil society initiatives focused on significant work in the AI space, according to the blog.