The technology companies Meta and IBM launched, along with 50 other international companies and research institutions, an artificial intelligence (AI) alliance with the aim of “moving towards an open, safe and responsible AI”, as well as gaining ground in the race to create the benchmark generative AI.
The coalition, called the AI Alliance, includes Intel, Oracle, Cornell University, Yale University, Tokyo University and the US National Science Foundation (government).
AI Alliance advocates open source, that is, when technology is shared for free.
“The AI 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, diversity and economic competitiveness,” notes Meta (parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) in a statement.
This could be interpreted as a common effort to stop the feet of the leading companies so far in generative AI, and fundamentally OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT and now allied with Microsoft.
Many of the members of this alliance are companies that have their own AI products – such as Meta’s Llama 2 model – and are fighting to steal the limelight and popularity from the AI tools of OpenAI and its investment partner, Microsoft.
According to the statement from Mark Zuckerberg’s company, the AI Alliance projects will seek to “responsibly advance the open ecosystem of foundational models with diverse modalities, including highly capable scientific, multilingual and multimodal models, that can help address society-wide challenges in climate, education and other areas.”
As well as, “fostering a vibrant AI hardware accelerator ecosystem by driving contributions and adoption of essential enabling software technology.”
Enterprises worldwide will invest nearly $16 billion in generative AI solutions alone this year, according to a forecast by research firm International Data Corp (IDC), and spending on the technology will reach $143 billion by 2027.