Meta Platforms Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. announced Tuesday the creation of the AI Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 artificial intelligence companies and research institutions advocating for an "open model" of AI.
"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, security, diversity and economic competitiveness," the coalition said in a statement posted by IBM (NYSE: IBM).
Members of the alliance include Intel, Oracle, CERN, Red Hat, Cornell University and the National Science Foundation, among others.
The alliance said its goal is to "support open innovation and open science in AI," something that Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Menlo Park-based Meta (Nasdaq: META), has been advocating for some time.
Speaking before the first AI Insight Forums in Washington, D.C., in June, Zuckerberg advocated for open-sourced large language models (LLMs), the data sets used to program and train AI platforms and products. The forums were organized by Senate Majority Leader Charles "Chuck" Schumer. Eight more are to be scheduled.
"Open source democratizes access to these tools, and that helps level the playing field and foster innovation for people and businesses," Zuckerberg said.
Speaking with the Wall Street Journal, Darío Gil, senior vice president at IBM and director of IBM Research, said the company has been working with Meta since August to bring together AI organizations that don't have the cache or public recognition of OpenAI and Microsoft's Bing.
"Frankly, we’ve been a little bit unsatisfied with the overall debate and the discussions on AI over the last year," Gil told the Journal. "We did not feel that it reflected the diversity of the ecosystem that is making this AI moment possible."
The Armonk, New York-based IBM has had a spotty history with AI, most notably its health care and oncology-focused AI platform Watson. Despite pouring more than $5 billion into the project, Watson failed to perform for IBM and the project was later dismantled.
The announcement also comes in the wake of OpenAI's recent turbulence with the firing, then rehiring of its CEO Sam Altman. Companies have begun looking for potential alternatives to OpenAI since the incident, and the alliance offers companies alternatives.
"This other way, it’s a much more distributed approach," Gil told the Wall Street Journal. "But much more resilient, because no given institution can derail the success of the open engine."
