IBM and Meta, along with several prominent universities, companies, and a group of tech startups and foundations, have formed an “AI Alliance.” The primary objective of this alliance is to challenge the dominance of established players such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon in the field of AI, and prompt open innovation in AI.

The announcement aims to disrupt the current state of the AI industry by fostering innovation and promoting healthy competition, by the partnership of universities, research institutions, and big-tech.

Apart from IBM and Meta, other participants include AMD, Anyscale, Cerebras, Hugging Face, Dell, Intel, Oracle, Stability AI, LangChain, Red Hat, Together AI, and universities such as IIT Bombay, UC Berkeley College of Computing, University of Illinois, University of Notre Dame, University of Texas, The University of Tokyo , Yale University, Cornell University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and several others. 

The main objective of the alliance are to:

• Create and implement benchmarks, standards, and tools for responsible global AI system development, emphasising safety, security, and trust.
• Promote open foundation models with diverse capabilities, focusing on multilingual, multimodal, and science models to address societal challenges.
• Boost contributions to the AI hardware accelerator ecosystem by enhancing essential enabling software technology.
• Support global AI skills development and exploratory research, engaging the academic community in essential AI model and tool research projects.
• Develop educational content to inform the public and policymakers about AI benefits, risks, solutions, and the need for precise regulation.
• Launch initiatives encouraging open and responsible AI development, hosting events to showcase how Alliance members use open technology in AI for positive impact.

The participating organisations are expected to collaborate on various projects, including research and development of new AI algorithms, hardware, and software. The AI Alliance aligns with a long-standing debate within the developer community regarding the merits of “open” versus “closed” development of AI. 

Dario Gil, who is a senior vice president at IBM and also heads the company’s research lab, has expressed his concern about the limited focus on a few institutions in the discourse on AI in the past year. Gil emphasised that the field of AI is much larger than what has been discussed so far. When asked about the specific institutions he was referring to, Gil chose not to name them directly, stating, “You know who.” 

Similarly, Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO said “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. This is a pivotal moment in defining the future of AI. IBM is proud to partner with like-minded organisations through the AI Alliance to ensure this open ecosystem drives an innovative AI agenda underpinned by safety, accountability and scientific rigour.

“Nick Clegg, President, Global Affairs of Meta said, “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.”