Meta, on an open source tear, wants to spread its influence further and wider in the ongoing battle for AI mindshare. This morning, the social network announced that it’s teaming up with IBM, whose audience is decidedly more corporate and enterprise, to launch the AI Alliance, a industry body to support “open innovation” and “open science” in AI. So what will the AI Alliance do exactly — and how will its work differ from the quite similar (at least in terms of its overarching mission, members and tenets) Partnership on AI? The Partnership on AI years ago promised to publish research using open source licenses and minutes from its meetings to, as the AI Alliance purportedly seeks to do, educate the public on pressing AI issues of the day. Well — confusingly — the Partnership on AI is in fact a member of the AI Alliance. The Alliance says that it plans to “utilize pre-existing collaborations” (including the Partnership on AI’s, presumably) to “identify opportunities that develop open AI resources that meet the needs of business and society equally and responsibly,” a press release shared last week with TechCrunch reads. The AI Alliance’s members will first form working groups, a governing board and a technical oversight committee dedicated to advancing areas like AI “trust and validation” metrics, hardware and infrastructure that supports AI training and open source AI models and frameworks. They’ll also establish project standards and guidelines, and then partner with “important existing initiatives” — initiatives conspicuously not named in the press release — from government, nonprofit and civil society organizations “who are doing valuable and aligned work in the AI space.” If that sounds a lot like what the inaugural members of the Alliance were already doing independently, you’re not wrong. But in the release, the AI Alliance stresses that its work — whatever form it ultimately takes — is intended to be complementary and additive rather than needlessly duplicative.
Full opinion : Meta and IBM form an AI Alliance, but to what end?
