Meta and IBM launch AI Alliance to promote responsible AI development
The coalition envisions an inclusive and diverse approach to AI innovation
Meta and IBM have unveiled the AI Alliance, a new initiative aimed at steering the course of AI development towards responsibility, transparency, and collaboration.
The alliance, led by IBM and Meta, boasts an impressive roster of over 50 founding members and collaborators, including AMD, Dell, Sony, Intel, and several renowned universities and AI startups.
In a joint statement, IBM and Meta outlined a series of initiatives to uphold their vision of responsible AI, encompassing the establishment of benchmarks and evaluation standards, the promotion of an AI hardware accelerator ecosystem, and the support for exploratory AI research on a global scale.
A key focus of AI Alliance is on diversity in AI foundation models, aiming to create highly capable multi-modal, multilingual, and science models to address societal challenges, particularly in areas such as climate and education.
The coalition envisions an inclusive approach to AI innovation, emphasising economic opportunity, diversity, safety, and benefits for all.
The AI Alliance has received widespread industry support, with major players like AMD, Intel, Dell Technologies, Sony, Hugging Face, Cerebras, and Oracle pledging their commitment. Leading research institutions, including Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Tokyo, UCLA Berkeley, and Imperial College London have also joined the coalition.
IBM emphasised the importance of an open and collaborative approach to AI innovation, stating that such an approach is critical for empowering a broad spectrum of AI researchers, builders, and adopters with the necessary information and tools to prioritise safety and diversity.
The alliance plans to launch or enhance AI projects aligned with core objectives, such as developing and implementing evaluation standards for AI systems and advocating for their widespread adoption.
"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," Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO said.
"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."
Nick Clegg, President, Global Affairs of Meta, stated: "We believe it's better when AI is developed openly - 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."
The alliance sounds like a positive development, but the absence of other industry giants such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic, and OpenAI has raised eyebrows. Indeed, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, having joined the Frontier Model Forum in July 2023, may be disinclined to join this new alliance.
Whilst some experts have expressed some cynicism about the partnership's feasibility, citing the competition among the Forum's members, others see it as a pivotal moment in the direction of AI development.
As the industry grapples with divergent approaches - openness and collaboration versus closed, proprietary methods - the future of AI development remains uncertain, but there is presently room for both strategies to coexist.