RALEIGH – Red Hat, which traces its founding three decades ago to Open Source, and corporate parent IBM are key players in a new artificial intelligence-focused organization that says it wants to advance “open innovation” and “open science” in AI rather than proprietary solutions.
Meta and chip maker AMD also are part of the new “AI Alliance.”
The group’s mission drew immediate praise from chip research firm Semianalysis.
“Meta and IBM are both embracing open source and contributing to it hugely in contrast to Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, who do not contribute to open source near as much. This alliance alongside AMD and others is a strong foot forward for the open source community from software to hardware,” Dylan Patel, chief analyst at semiconductor research and consulting firm Semianalysis, told InfoWorld.
Patel drew a contrast to the approach of other techy giants such as Amazon Wed Services and Microsoft.
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“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,” AI Alliance said.
Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO, pointed out in the announcement: “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.”
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Added Matt Hicks, Raleigh-based Red Hat’s CEO: “Collaboration and open innovation have always been true catalysts for progress. The launch of the AI Alliance marks a visionary milestone, uniting industry giants, academia, and innovators with a shared responsibility to shape the future and advance open innovation, ensuring that the transformative power of AI is harnessed responsibly and ethically. As a founding member of the AI Alliance, Red Hat recognizes the collective potential of an open, healthy AI community — a force that will not only build technologies but also advocate for a future where innovation knows no bounds.”
AI Alliance plans to start or enhance projects that meet the following objectives:
As outlined by the group, which has more than 50 members including public and private sector players, the objectives are:
- 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.
- 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.
