Hello and welcome to Eye on AI.
As the AI industry has blossomed, it’s also fractured into camps around the idea of openness. Advocates for the open-source approach to AI say it promotes innovation and provides vital transparency, while those against argue that open-sourcing these powerful technologies leaves them open for misuse. Lately, critics have argued that many of the prominent so-called “open” AI technologies aren’t so open after all, and that the word has become more an object of marketing than a technical descriptor.
A new group called the AI Alliance, launched today by Meta and IBM along with around 50 founding members across industry, startup, academia, research, and government, wants to blow the whole debate wide open. The group—which includes AI leaders like Hugging Face and Stability AI—rejects the current dichotomy, believes it has minimized the definition and benefits of open, and is looking to expand the emphasis on open far beyond models.
“The motivation of the alliance is actually to bring together a set of institutions and stakeholders who truly believe that open innovation, open discussions, open technology, open platforms, open ways of even defining safety, open ways of benchmarking, of exchanging data, is actually the right way to both advance the technology and make the benefits available broadly,” Sriram Raghavan, VP of AI Research at IBM, told Fortune.
When asked how the AI Alliance is defining “open,” Raghavan said that at this point he doesn’t want to say it has a point of view, but rather that the Alliance is meant to be a place where this can be explored. “We want to create a working group to form that point. Where we see opportunity here is to recognize that there are different levels of gradation of what ‘open’ means,” he said.
For one example, Raghavan described the potential to create a framework for releasing models with varying levels of openness.
“Even to define what those levels are, what are the standards? How do you classify different levels of openness? What is it that we should mandate is absolutely open?” he said, proposing the types of nuances the AI Alliance aims to tackle. He also hopes these efforts will widen the AI conversation to focus on other uses of AI beyond LLMs, such as the use of AI for scientific discovery.
The advances in AI that led to this moment largely happened because of decades of an open, research-oriented approach. But now that AI has gone commercial, the tides have changed. Some of the biggest players in AI such as Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic have taken closed approaches so far (and are subsequently absent from the AI Alliance’s list of initial members). At the same time, large companies that have positioned themselves firmly in the open-source camp have come under fire for falsely claiming openness without disclosing key features of their AI systems, while at the same time using their offerings to further entrench their ownership over the landscape.
Meta, which is taking a leading role by co-launching the group along with IBM, has been at the center of this criticism. In a paper published this summer, for example, researchers called Meta’s claim that Llama-2 is open-source “contested, shallow, and borderline dishonest,” arguing that the model fails to meet key criteria that would enable it to be conventionally considered open-source. It’s interesting context when considering the AI Alliance’s mission to redefine and create varying levels of openness. Rather than embracing the previous ideals around open source, it looks like Meta is stepping forward to change the ideals.
This dynamic prompts questions about whether these efforts could be geared to further benefit incumbents. While the AI Alliance won’t be spared from the debates about open versus closed and who benefits from each, the group’s dynamic membership provides some sense of balance. Meta is a founding member, but so is CERN, the Linux Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and more than a dozen academic institutions from across the globe.
The AI Alliance will work on a project basis, meaning members will launch and autonomously run projects that others can join as they see fit. And while figuring out what “open” will actually mean to the group remains the first priority, Raghavan emphasizes that the AI Alliance wants to build, enable through skills and training, and advocate around its open approach to responsible AI.
“If you just look across the Alliance, we're talking about double-digit billion dollars of R&D capacity, millions of students who are trained and educated,” Raghavan said. “So there is a wealth here of opportunity to influence, and I think the institutions here are aligned around coming together so that we can then, you know, go in or drive the narrative in a way that makes sense to all of us.”
And with that, here’s the rest of this week’s AI news.
Sage Lazzaro
sage.lazzaro@consultant.fortune.com
sagelazzaro.com
