Stability AI has announced the launch of a new medical AI research organisation called MedARC (Medical AI Research Center)—​​a novel, open, and collaborative approach to research dedicated to advancing the field of AI applied to healthcare.

The development of large deep learning models, commonly referred to as foundation models, has opened the door to numerous innovative and previously unimaginable applications. However, despite these advancements, the use cases for medical AI have often been limited.

Now, MedARC wants to develop these foundational models for medicine and build interdisciplinary teams to address clinical needs. What sets MedARC apart is that it wants to do science in the open. All their research and datasets will be made available to the public for free.

“We have established a public environment with asynchronous communication, a Discord server, which allows others to discuss, contribute and follow research progress. This open approach has been successful for AI research in NLP (EleutherAI), multimodality (LAION), and biology (OpenBioML). Therefore, we believe a similar environment will be beneficial for medical AI research and enable new opportunities,” MedARC said in a blog post. 

Last year, Stability AI’s popularity soared following the launch of their text-to-image AI model, ‘Stable Diffusion’. But soon after, ChatGPT happened, and since then, the popular OpenAI chatbot has changed the AI landscape significantly.

However, Stability AI is reportedly working on an open-source version of ChatGPT.