AI Alliance Formed by IBM and Meta in Support of Open Source AI, Challenging Tech Giants

A consortium of 50 private companies and research institutions, led by IBM and Meta, has announced the establishment of the AI Alliance. The primary objective of this collaboration is to set standards for the AI industry, emphasizing openness and transparency.

The AI Alliance aims to develop benchmark metrics for AI performance, with a particular focus on security. Additionally, they seek to develop open-source foundation models, accelerate AI processing through chip development, and collaborate with educational institutions to enhance skills and disseminate knowledge.

Among the participating companies are AMD, Cerebras, Dell Technologies, Hugging Face, Intel, Oracle, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Sony, and Stability AI. Distinguished research institutions and educational establishments, such as A*STAR, Cornell, Dartmouth, ETH Zurich, Imperial College London, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Keio University, New York University, UC Berkeley, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, The University of Texas at Austin, The University of Tokyo, and Yale, also join the group.

Notably absent from the AI Alliance are major cloud companies Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, as well as prominent AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic. These giants are inclined to keep their models proprietary and not release them to the public.

Conversely, AI Alliance members are supporters of the open-source approach. Meta, for instance, has been open with its Llama 2 release since its inception. Other participating companies embracing openness include Stability AI with its Stable Diffusion platform, as well as Hugging Face, LangChain, and LlamaIndex.

TLDR: The AI Alliance, led by IBM and Meta, is a consortium of 50 private companies and research institutions aiming to establish AI industry standards. They prioritize openness and transparency and intend to develop benchmark metrics, foundation models, AI processing chips, and educational collaborations. Notably absent from the alliance are major cloud and AI companies inclined to keep their models proprietary, while the participating members embrace an open-source approach.