IBM, Meta Behind New Big Name AI Alliance

The world’s biggest tech firms are pooling their resources and knowledge with startups, academia, research and government to drive “responsible innovation” in artificial intelligence (AI).

Co-launched by IBM and Meta, the AI Alliance comprises more than 50 organizations. It hopes to provide an open platform for sharing and developing for researchers, developers and adopters, globally.

This way, it said the AI community will innovate faster and more inclusively. It also aims to identify specific risks, to mitigate them before putting a product into the world.

AI Alliance Sets Out Its Plan

In a blog, the AI Alliance set out a series of action points to reach its objectives.

It wants to develop and deploy benchmarks and evaluation standards, and tools, among other resources. These, it said, will enable the responsible development and use of AI systems at global scale. This includes creating a catalog of vetted safety, security and trust tools. It will also advocate for these tools for use within the developer community for model and application development.

Secondly, the AI Alliance wants to advance an ecosystem of open foundation models with diverse modalities. These include multilingual, multi-modal and science models that can help address society-wide challenges in climate, education and beyond.

Additionally, the group wants to foster “a vibrant AI hardware accelerator ecosystem” by boosting contributions and adoption of enabling software technology.

Elsewhere, it will support global AI skills building and exploratory research through the academic community. Its goal is for researchers and students to learn and contribute to essential AI model and tool research projects.

Meanwhile, the Alliance will develop educational content and resources to inform the public and policymakers on the benefits, risks, solutions and precision regulation for AI.

Finally, it aims to launch initiatives that “encourage open development of AI in safe and beneficial ways.” To that end, the consortium will host events to explore AI use cases and showcase how Alliance members are using open technology in AI responsibly and for good.

Founder Members of AI Alliance

Founding members and big-name collaborators from the tech industry include AMD, Dell Technologies, Intel, Linux Foundation, Red Hat and ServiceNow.

IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna described the AI Alliance as “a pivotal moment in defining the future of AI.”

IBM's Arvind Krishna

He said that the AI Alliance is an open ecosystem [driving] “an innovative AI agenda underpinned by safety, accountability and scientific rigor.”

Nick Clegg, president, global affairs at Meta, said open development of AI means “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.”

Lisa Su, AMD CEO and chair, agreed that by embracing open standards and transparency, “we can help ensure the transformational benefits of responsible AI are broadly available.”

AMD's Lisa Su

The AI Alliance will begin with the formation of member-driven working groups across its focus areas. It will also establish a governing board and technical oversight committee and establish project standards and guidelines.