Shaking Up the AI Industry With the New ‘AI Alliance’

In the ever-evolving AI landscape, some of the industry veterans like IBM, Intel, Sony Group, and Dell have not been as prominently spotlighted as their younger counterparts. But this narrative took a remarkable shift on Tuesday when these tech companies, together with Meta, several prestigious universities, and an array of tech startups and foundations, unveiled their “AI Alliance.” This move is seen as a strategic counter to the dominance of industry leaders like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and, more recently, Amazon.

“To some degree, but unfortunately, to a large degree, the last year of conversation and dialogue around AI has been focused on a very small number of institutions. The reality is that this field is much, much larger than that.”

Darío Gil, a senior vice president at IBM and head of the corporation’s research lab, via Fortune

Open vs. Closed AI Development

The birth of the AI Alliance rekindles the age-old debate on the merits of “open” versus “closed” AI development. Despite the term “open” in its name, OpenAI, the architect of ChatGPT, has kept its colossal AI algorithms under wraps. Access to these algorithms requires permission from OpenAI, whose primary supporter is Microsoft. Similarly, AI leaders like Google and Amazon, the latter of which recently introduced its ChatGPT rival and invested in the sought-after AI startup Anthropic, have also refrained from fully open-sourcing their models, citing competition and safety concerns.

This approach has sparked frustration among researchers and rival businesses. Interestingly, the disarray in OpenAI’s corporate leadership in November was met with satisfaction from competitors. IBM’s Darío Gil questioned the future direction of AI, probing whether it should be confined and proprietary, or whether it should lean more toward “open-source, open science, and open innovation.”

What’s on the AI Alliance’s Agenda?

Standing firmly on the side of openness, the AI Alliance, composed of more than 50 entities, has set several overarching goals. These include developing standardized frameworks for appraising AI algorithms, dedicating resources to AI research funds, and cooperating on open-source models.

This alliance isn’t just made up of largely established corporate companies. Chip manufacturers such as AMD and Cerebras, AI startups including Hugging Face and Stability AI, as well as Ivy League universities like Yale, Cornell, and Dartmouth also count themselves in.

Citing IBM’s collaboration with NASA on a recently open-sourced AI model trained on geospatial data as an example, Gil highlighted how the model can assist in monitoring deforestation or forecasting crop yields. IBM is further investing nearly $100 million over the next five years to back AI research projects at universities. Furthermore, IBM has partnered with Meta to construct an open-source toolkit for AI development.