Over at the official Meta blog, the company formerly called Facebook published the following information yesterday:

AI Alliance Launches as an International Community of Leading Technology Developers, Researchers, and Adopters Collaborating Together to Advance Open, Safe, Responsible AI

IBM and Meta Launch the AI Alliance in collaboration with over 50 Founding Members and Collaborators globally including AMD, Anyscale, CERN, Cerebras, Cleveland Clinic, Cornell University, Dartmouth, Dell Technologies, EPFL, ETH, Hugging Face, Imperial College London, Intel, INSAIT, Linux Foundation, MLCommons, MOC Alliance operated by Boston University and Harvard University, NASA, NSF, Oracle, Partnership on AI, Red Hat, Roadzen, ServiceNow, Sony Group, Stability AI, University of California Berkeley, University of Illinois, University of Notre Dame, The University of Tokyo, Yale University and others

AI advancements are leading to new opportunities that can improve how we work, live, learn and interact with one another. Open and transparent innovation is essential to empower a broad spectrum of AI researchers, builders, and adopters with the information and tools needed to harness these advancements in ways that prioritize safety, diversity, economic opportunity and benefits to all.

While there are many individual companies, start-ups, researchers, governments, and others who are committed to open science and open technologies and want to participate in the new wave of AI innovation, more collaboration and information sharing will help the community innovate faster and more inclusively, and identify specific risks and mitigate those risks before putting a product into the world.

That is why today, we’re launching the AI Alliance — a group of leading organizations across industry, startup, academia, research and government coming together to support open innovation and open science in AI. The AI Alliance is action oriented and decidedly international, designed to create opportunities everywhere through a diverse range of institutions that can shape the evolution of AI in ways that better reflect the needs and the complexity of our societies.

The AI Alliance is focused on fostering an open community and enabling developers and researchers to accelerate responsible innovation in AI while ensuring scientific rigor, trust, safety, security, diversity and economic competitiveness. By bringing together leading developers, scientists, academic institutions, companies, and other innovators, we will pool resources and knowledge to address safety concerns while providing a platform for sharing and developing solutions that fit the needs of researchers, developers, and adopters around the world.

To do that, the AI Alliance plans to start or enhance projects that meet the following objectives:

  • Develop and deploy benchmarks and evaluation standards, tools, and other resources that enable the responsible development and use of AI systems at global scale, including the creation of a catalog of vetted safety, security and trust tools. Support the advocacy and enablement of these tools with the developer community for model and application development.
  • Responsibly advance the ecosystem of open foundation models with diverse modalities, including highly capable multilingual, multi-modal, and science models that can help address society-wide challenges in climate, education, and beyond.
  • Foster a vibrant AI hardware accelerator ecosystem by boosting contributions and adoption of essential enabling software technology.
  • Support global AI skills building and exploratory research. Engage the academic community to support researchers and students to learn and contribute to essential AI model and tool research projects.
  • Develop educational content and resources to inform the public discourse and policymakers on benefits, risks, solutions and precision regulation for AI.
  • Launch initiatives that encourage open development of AI in safe and beneficial ways, and host events to explore AI use cases and showcase how Alliance members are using open technology in AI responsibly and for good.

Who We Are

To ensure open innovation in AI benefits everyone and that it is built responsibly, the AI Alliance consists of a broad range of organizations that are working across aspects of AI education, research, development and deployment, and governance.

We are:

  • The creators of the tooling driving AI benchmarking, trust and validation metrics and best practices, and application creation such as MLPerf, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, and open-source AI toolkits for explainability, privacy, adversarial robustness, and fairnessevaluation.
  • The universities and science agencies that educate and support generation after generation of AI scientists and engineers and push the frontiers of AI research through open science.
  • The builders of the hardware and infrastructure that supports AI training and applications — from the needed GPUs to custom AI accelerators and cloud platforms.
  • The champions of frameworks that drive platform software including PyTorch, Transformers, Diffusers, Kubernetes, Ray, Hugging Face Text generation inference and Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning.
  • The creators of some of today’s most used open models including Llama2, Stable Diffusion, StarCoder, Bloom, and many others.

IBM and Meta are proud to co-launch the AI Alliance with leading organizations across industry, government and academia. Partners and collaborators include:

  • Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)
  • Aitomatic
  • AMD
  • Anyscale
  • Cerebras
  • CERN
  • Cleveland Clinic
  • Cornell University
  • Dartmouth
  • Dell Technologies
  • Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
  • ETH Zurich
  • Fast.ai
  • Fenrir, Inc.
  • FPT Software
  • Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Hugging Face
  • IBM
  • Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
  • Imperial College London
  • Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
  • Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
  • Intel
  • Keio University
  • LangChain
  • LlamaIndex
  • Linux Foundation
  • Mass Open Cloud Alliance, operated by Boston University and Harvard
  • Meta
  • Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
  • MLCommons
  • National Aeronautics and Space Administration
  • National Science Foundation
  • New York University
  • NumFOCUS
  • OpenTeams
  • Oracle
  • Partnership on AI
  • Quansight
  • Red Hat
  • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
  • Roadzen
  • Sakana AI
  • SB Intuitions
  • ServiceNow
  • Silo AI
  • Simons Foundation
  • Sony Group
  • Stability AI
  • Together AI
  • TU Munich
  • UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • The University of Notre Dame
  • The University of Texas at Austin
  • The University of Tokyo
  • Yale University

How the AI Alliance Will Work

The AI Alliance will begin its work with the formation of member-driven working groups across all major topical areas listed above. The Alliance will also establish a governing board and technical oversight committee dedicated to advancing the above project areas, as well as establishing overall project standards and guidelines.

In addition to bringing together leading developers, scientists, academics, students, and business leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, the AI Alliance will plan to partner with important existing initiatives from governments, non-profit and civil society organizations who are doing valuable and aligned work in the AI space.

To learn more about the Alliance, visit here.

Member Quotes

Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO: “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 organizations through the AI Alliance to ensure this open ecosystem drives an innovative AI agenda underpinned by safety, accountability and scientific rigor.”

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

Lisa Su, AMD CEO and Chair: “At AMD, we are committed to advancing technology through collaboration. The history of our industry highlights how open, standards-based development leveraging the capabilities of the entire industry both accelerate innovation and ensure technology advances have the largest positive impact. By embracing open standards and transparency across all aspects of the rapidly developing AI ecosystem, we can help ensure the transformational benefits of responsible AI are broadly available. We are proud to join with other industry leaders as a founding member of the AI Alliance and look forward to working together to ensure the rapid advances in AI are a force for positive change.”

Dr. Sun Sumei, Acting Executive Director, ASTAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R):“As a research institute under ASTAR, I²R spearheads research initiatives and actively strives to enhance the tangible impact of our innovations to address the national needs of Singapore and its people. We are proud to be a founding member of this AI Alliance, which will allow us to play a pivotal role in the ecosystem, contribute to the development of ethical and trustworthy AI innovations with well-regulated AI models for impactful real-world applications. Through the collective efforts with the rest of the members, we believe that the evolution, application and adoption of AI will reach new heights.”

Christopher Nguyen, CEO, Aitomatic & Industrial AI Leader: “AI independence is vital for industrial companies, focusing on specialized domain expertise as key to competitiveness. Open-source foundations, driven by the AI Alliance, are essential for seamless model deployment at the computing edge. Aitomatic and our partners are eager to both contribute to and benefit from the transformative impact of the global AI Alliance.”

Robert Nishihara, CEO of Anyscale: “AI will have a positive impact on our daily lives and address some of the world’s most pressing challenges, but like with any new technology or innovation, we need to consider the risks. To ensure that open source communities can continue to flourish, innovate, deliver rich technological progress and advance the broader AI ecosystem, it’s imperative that we advance AI ethics, governance and safety. The AI Alliance is an important step to ensuring that our society can benefit from AI responsibly and equitably.”

Yannis Paschalidis, Distinguished Professor of ECE and Director of the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering at Boston University: “The Hariri Institute, which houses the multi-institutional Mass Open Cloud Alliance (MOC Alliance), is excited to have the MOC Alliance join the AI Alliance as a founding member. The MOC Alliance was formed to provide an affordable open cloud platform to the research community, thus furthering the goals of the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) — a joint venture of Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, and UMass. The Hariri Institute has a history of supporting open-source efforts and is at the forefront of AI innovations with applications in science, biomedicine, and health care, where open, trusted, unbiased, and ethical AI models are particularly important.”

Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO, Cerebras Systems: “Cerebras’ mission is to transform AI compute and democratize access to AI for customers around the world. In alliance with this community of global technology leaders, we look forward to accelerating the progress and contributions of the open source AI community in the most efficient, collaborative, and responsible way possible.”

Tom Mihaljevic, M.D., Cleveland Clinic CEO and President, and holder of the Morton L. Mandel CEO Chair: “We are pleased to become a founding member of the AI Alliance. As a leader in healthcare AI, we recognize that it has the potential to quickly accelerate the pace of medical research and enhance patient care. AI capabilities are now constantly growing and improving, and it is critical that organizations from diverse fields come together to help advance AI discoveries and technologies while also addressing concerns around security and safety. We are looking forward to working on these important issues collaboratively with the Alliance members.”

Krystyn J Van Vliet, Vice President for Research and Innovation at Cornell University: “Cornell looks forward to participating in this AI Alliance, and to the range of participants and perspectives around this table. Open innovation has spurred incredible advances in many fields including AI and thrives on experimentation and dialogue. We look forward to contributing to the discussions, technologies, and advances that will help the world develop knowledge and tools using AI, as well as a shared sense of responsibility for positive impact on society.”

Dave Kotz, Provost and the Pat and John Rosenwald Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College: “Dartmouth, where ‘artificial intelligence’ was first envisioned in 1956, is excited to be part of this alliance and committed to ensuring AI is transparent, trustworthy, and serves all humanity going forward.”

Jeff Boudreau, chief AI officer, Dell Technologies: “AI progress that drives real value for humanity can only happen with open innovation and in open ecosystems. The AI Alliance is a positive step in making sure a diverse set of voices are collaborating transparently for the benefit of all.”

Marcel Salathé & Pascal Frossard, co-directors of the EPFL AI Center: “EPFL is committed to the open, transparent, and safe development of AI, recognizing its significance for everyone. Through global collaborations like the AI alliance, we aim to ensure that progress in AI technology is ethical, efficient, and universally beneficent.”

Jeremy Howard, founding researcher, Fast.ai: “Open source is the backbone of all leading artificial intelligence software. With open source, the entire community comes together to collaborate on solving the toughest problems, the most effective solutions rise to the top, and everyone benefits.”

Phong Nguyen, CAIO, FPT Software: “FPT Software is thrilled and honored to join the Alliance, where we believe that openness and transparency are key to ensuring the safe and responsible deployment of AI. Committed to this vision, we aim to work closely with various stakeholders to enhance open-science AI, ultimately bringing significant social benefits to the industry.”

President Asher Cohen, Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “Joining the AI Alliance marks a pivotal moment for Hebrew University, where collaboration meets innovation. We’re thrilled to be part of this coalition driving the future of AI, fostering open technologies, nurturing talent, and championing ethical, trusted AI practices. Together, we’ll forge pathways for global education, build robust frameworks, and advocate for policies that nurture a vibrant, open AI ecosystem. This alliance is a beacon illuminating our commitment to shaping a responsible, inclusive future powered by the boundless possibilities of artificial intelligence.”

Atish Dabholkar, ICTP Director: “ICTP is pleased to be part of the high-level, international research community underpinning the AI Alliance that includes major players in the field. We share a commitment to exploring new scientific horizons and to sharing new knowledge openly. AI has the potential to radically change the way science is done, and by joining this Alliance we will ensure that our large international network of scientists have open access to the latest in AI innovation, training and governance, regardless of geographical borders.”

Professor Varsha Apte, Head, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay: “The Computer Science Department of IIT Bombay is excited to be part of the AI Alliance. We hope to contribute towards creating and deploying speech and language models over more diverse languages, accents and dialects, while also investigating foundation models for better representation of structurally rich information.”

Professor Bob Shorten, Head of Dyson School of Engineering, Imperial College London: “We are delighted to be a founding member of the AI Alliance. At Imperial College London, we believe that community engagement is essential for making AI trusted, responsible, transparent, as well as auditable. We look forward to engaging with the Alliance community to realise these objectives.”

Professor Martin Vechev, Scientific Director of INSAIT, Full Professor at ETH Zurich: “INSAIT is delighted to join the AI Alliance and help pave the way towards a more transparent, open, safe and trustworthy AI.”

Deepak Patil, CVP and GM Intel Datacenter AI Solutions: “Intel has long supported the open ecosystem to drive innovation and the future of technology. The AI Alliance provides an opportunity for a broad community to come together to advance the future of artificial intelligence technologies including data sets, models and tools rooted in responsibility, ethics, trustworthy and security practices. By collaborating across the industry, the advancement of this technology can be driven forward with speed and transparency. We look forward to working with this diverse group to help shape an open, responsible AI ecosystem.”

Prof. Kohei Itoh, President, Keio University: “Keio University is excited to be a part of this new alliance that will play a key role in our contribution to expanding the horizon of computing by combining supercomputing, quantum computing, semiconductor, and AI research.”

Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, Linux Foundation: “The AI Alliance is another milestone in the process of providing for openly shareable software, data, and other assets essential to the development of transparent, advanced and trustworthy AI. Open collaborative processes and open governance are essential to these efforts and working with our PyTorch Foundation, LF AI and Data Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, we look forward to participating in and assisting the Alliance by providing a neutral home for essential elements of the AI ecosystem.”

Jerry Liu, Co-founder and CEO, Llama Index: “Open-source software is one of the most important components in making sure that AI is understandable, explainable, and accessible to everyone. The mission of LlamaIndex is to empower all developers to connect LLMs with their private data. We support the development of open-source models and supporting tooling so that developers can take advantage of a strong ecosystem of different choices in achieving this mission.”

Orran Krieger, Professor ECE and CS and Director of the Mass Open Cloud Alliance (MOC Alliance): “The MOC Alliance is excited to have its open production cloud be a part of the Open AI Alliance. The AI Alliance’s mission of enabling AI in an open and transparent matter is an exciting match for a cloud based on open source with all the operations state and telemetry available to enable innovation. We hope to both be a cost-effective platform for many of the research and non-profit users that are part of the AI Alliance, as well as a place where AI Alliance participants who are developing new tools and platforms can expose their innovation to our large community of existing AI researchers/users.”

Timothy Baldwin, Acting Provost, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI): “MBZUAI recognizes the transformative impact of collaborative efforts in fostering innovation. The open ecosystem cultivated by the alliance mirrors our core values, emphasizing principles such as scientific rigor, trust, ethics, transparency and responsibility. As one of the founding members, MBZUAI recognizes the transformative potential of foundation models and generative AI. Our recent launch of the Institute of Foundational Models solidifies our commitment to advancing academic research into foundational models with linguistic, visual, and biological capabilities and beyond. These models are driving transformation in industries as diverse as sustainability and healthcare. We are honored to be part of the AI Alliance, and we eagerly anticipate the collaborative strides we will make towards shaping a future where AI benefits people and society everywhere.”

David Kanter, MLCommons Executive Director: “MLCommons believes in collaborative engineering to build industry standard benchmarks and metrics to help drive AI forward in key areas such as performance and safety. We look forward to working with the AI Alliance in these areas to make all AI safer for everyone.”

Kevin Murphy, Chief Science Data Officer, NASA: “Open innovation is all but essential to ensuring equitable access and collaboration around AI and root this technology in principles that adhere to the strongest standards of diversity, trust and ingenuity. NASA is excited about efforts like the AI Alliance to continue enabling the global community of scientists, researchers, and practitioners committed to responsible, trustworthy AI technologies.”

Sethuraman Panchanathan, NSF Director: “The U.S. National Science Foundation is delighted to partner with the AI Alliance through the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot to meet our shared goals of supporting AI-driven discovery, innovation, and open science. The NAIRR pilot will connect America’s broad and diverse research community with the resources needed to pursue the frontiers of AI so that we can all be assured it is safe, secure, and trustworthy. The resources and tools developed by the AI Alliance will be made available to the research community through the NAIRR pilot, strengthening and extending the pilot’s ability to advance AI innovation in areas of societal and economic importance and ensuring the U.S. remains in the vanguard of competitiveness in this key technology.”

Leah Silen, Executive Director, NumFOCUS: “NumFOCUS supports many of the open-source scientific computing projects and communities foundational to AI research and innovation. We look forward to opportunities for collaboration among this community of support and advocacy for open-source AI.”

Stacie Bloom, Chief Research Officer and Vice Provost for Research, NYU: “NYU is excited about this opportunity to connect our world class AI research community with so many outstanding institutions including IBM and Meta. This Alliance aligns with our goals to drive science and technology solutions on a global scale, and in a way that is safe, responsible, accessible and equitable.”

Travis E. Oliphant, author of NumPy and SciPy, founder of Anaconda, CEO and founder of Quansight and OpenTeams: “We’re eager to contribute to an open, collaborative dialogue shaping the responsible development of AI. Embracing principles of transparency, ethics, and collaboration amplified by the open-source communities we serve, we envision a future where diverse voices continue to drive socially beneficial innovation in AI. Our commitment is to actively collaborate and share our expertise to ensure a responsible, open, and accessible AI ecosystem.”

Rebecca Finlay, CEO, Partnership on AI: “Partnership on AI is dedicated to creating a global community to catalyze AI developments that benefit people and society. It is important that open science and innovation contribute to safe and responsible AI. We look forward to continuing our work on this with PAI Partners, members of the Alliance, and the broader AI ecosystem.”

Matt Hicks, president and CEO, Red Hat: “Collaboration and open innovation have always been true catalysts for progress. The launch of the AI Alliance marks a visionary milestone, uniting industry giants, academia, and innovators with a shared responsibility to shape the future and advance open innovation, ensuring that the transformative power of AI is harnessed responsibly and ethically. As a founding member of the AI Alliance, Red Hat recognizes the collective potential of an open, healthy AI community — a force that will not only build technologies but also advocate for a future where innovation knows no bounds.”

Martin A. Schmidt, Ph.D., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute President: “Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is honored to become a founding member of the AI Alliance. We believe the responsible application of artificial intelligence enables infinite possibilities in discovery and innovation. We look forward to collaborating with the alliance as we accelerate our work in artificial intelligence and quantum computing.”

Rohan Malhotra, CEO and Founder, Roadzen: “The AI Alliance’s focus on fostering an open and diverse ecosystem is a pivotal step in advancing AI research worldwide. It’s a striking contrast to the idea of AI being tightly controlled by a few entities. As Roadzen joins this global initiative alongside the industry’s leaders and researchers, our commitment is twofold: to support this vision and to leverage our expertise in building AI that is not just groundbreaking but also safe, accessible, and beneficial for all.”

CJ Desai, president & COO, ServiceNow: “AI innovation must remain open to drive positive and equitable societal impact, foster continued progress, and address potential risks collaboratively. There is no room for a winner-take-all approach; the development of responsible, secure LLMs comes in many forms. By joining this alliance, ServiceNow is doubling down on open innovation, harnessing the collective talent and expertise across the global open-source community. This move aims to ensure AI development is grounded in the needs of society, both today and in the future.”

David Spergel, President, Simons Foundation: “The Simons Foundation is strongly committed to open codes, open data and open scientific literature. We have been long supporters of the arXiv, a key site for open science. We see this support of open source code for AI as essential for both advancing the science and enabling ethical use of AI.”

Dr. Hiroaki Kitano, Senior Executive Vice President and CTO of Sony Group Corporation: “As a global technology and entertainment company, Sony believes in developing new technology for the benefit of the creative community and society at large in an ethical, legal, and responsible manner. We look forward to working together with representatives from the diverse international open-source community across industry, academic, research, and government organizations to develop AI models, data, guidelines and best practices that ensure safe and responsible usage of such technology.”

Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI: “Stability AI, a leader in developing advanced open AI models, and IBM, a champion of open-source innovation, proudly announce our partnership with The AI Alliance. Together, we are poised to redefine the landscape of generative AI, focusing on breakthrough innovations with a steadfast commitment to trust and safety in this dynamic field.”

Vipul Ved Prakash, Co-founder and CEO of Together AI: “We are excited to join the alliance because we believe in the power of the community and openness. This is the path to safe and responsible AI, and we are interested in building the platform to enable the open models community to thrive.”

Thomas F. Hofmann, TUM president: “With this alliance, we want to accelerate the development of responsible, socially acceptable and scalable AI solutions in partnership with other leading universities and companies.”

Jennifer Chayes, Dean, UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society: “Pursuing open innovation levels the playing field, allowing everyone to share in the benefits of generative AI.”

Rashid Bashir, dean of The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: “Grainger Engineers have been conducting AI research since the dawn of computing and UIUC is a hotbed of AI innovation today because of that rich history. Today, with three of the nation’s NSF AI Institutes, and numerous cross-sector partnerships, we are advancing research and workforce development to accelerate safe, responsible AI progress. UIUC is proud to join our esteemed peers and partners in this vital alliance.”

University President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., University of Notre Dame: “Innovations in artificial intelligence offer, at the same time, the promise of serving the common good and the threat of undermining it. It is critical that we engage serious ethical questions about AI alongside the technological. Notre Dame has long been a place for researching and reflecting on the ethical implications of science and technology, and we are pleased that through the AI Alliance we will be able to lend a distinctive voice and perspective to the conversation about building technologies that are both innovative and ethical.”

Jeffrey F. Rhoads, vice president for research and professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame: “The technologies that will truly move our world forward will be the ones that emerge from an inclusive, interdisciplinary innovation ecosystem. As a founding partner in the AI Alliance, Notre Dame’s engineers, data scientists, ethicists, and other researchers will be able to collaborate to build that ecosystem, joining both with AI labs around the world and with the industry partners who get new technologies into the hands of users. This will bring an unprecedented opportunity to our faculty and our students as they help steer innovations that bring benefits to society.”

Adam Klivans, Director, UT-Austin Machine Learning Lab: “The AI and ML researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, led by the Machine Learning Lab (MLL) and Good Systems, look forward to working closely with members of the AI Alliance to broaden access to generative AI for the purpose of accelerating research. We are excited about exploring ways to leverage its benefits, safeguard against AI dangers while simultaneously advancing the state of the art in AI capabilities.”

Prof. Hiroaki Aihara, Executive Vice President of the University of Tokyo: “The University Tokyo is thrilled to be part of the AI Alliance, together to support open innovation and open science in AI for the benefit of society at large.”

Jeffrey Brock, Dean of the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science. “We are excited to join the AI Alliance as a founding partner. Its commitment to innovative and open AI development aligns with our vision at Yale Engineering. This partnership enables us to work with a broad range of university and industry leadership to pursue collaborative research, while formulating policy and standards for safe, explainable, and trustworthy AI.”