There is another big news coming from the AI technology community. Meta Platforms and IBM have taken the lead in forming an AI alliance to reshape the AI landscape.

On Tuesday, December 5, local time, IBM announced that IBM, Meta, AMD, and more than 50 companies and research institutes from around the world have joined forces to form an AI alliance.

It is reported that this move is aimed at countering the dominant position of OpenAI, promoting “open innovation and open science” in the field of artificial intelligence, and reshaping the future of AI through implementation and security commitments.

The AI League is here

The members of the AI Alliance include well-known companies and research institutes such as Intel, Oracle, Cornell University, and the National Science Foundation, but ChatGPT development company OpenAI is not included.

Specifically, the members of the alliance include IBM, Meta, AMD, Intel, IBM, Oracle, Hugging Face, Sony Group, Stability AI, Anyscale, Cerebras, Cleveland Clinic, Cornell University, Dell Technologies, Fast.ai, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Imperial College London, Keio University, the Linux Foundation, the Large-Scale Open Course (MOC) Alliance operated by Boston University and Harvard University. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Red Hat (Red Hat), ServiceNow, Together AI, UC Berkeley School of Computational Data Science and Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Tokyo, and Yale University.

The alliance said it is integrating resources to support “open innovation and open science” in the field of AI, and that members of the alliance basically support open source.

Dario Gil, senior vice president of IBM and head of IBM Research, said that IBM has been cooperating with Meta since August to bring together organizations that have not received as much attention as OpenAI.

Gil emphasized the need to be more inclusive in representing the diverse ecosystems driving current advances in artificial intelligence.

“Frankly speaking, we're not that happy with the overall debate and discussion surrounding AI over the past year. We don't think those discussions reflect the diversity of the AI ecosystem, but it's this diversity that makes the AI era possible.”

Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, said the AI Alliance brings researchers, developers, and companies together to share tools and knowledge that can help everyone make progress regardless of whether models are shared publicly or not.

Su Zifeng, CEO and Chairman of AMD, saidBy adopting open standards and transparency in every aspect of the rapidly growing artificial intelligence ecosystem.

“We can help ensure that the transformative benefits of responsible artificial intelligence are widely used.”

Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT a year ago, generative AI has been the focus of technical discussions.

OpenAI and its competitors, such as Anthropic and Cohere, are generally leading the way in developing advanced AI models. These models are built as closed or proprietary systems, managed by their creators, and companies that use these AI systems pay developers.

Unlike the closed system maintained by the creators,The AI Alliance promotes open source technology and promotes collaboration among industry giants, academia, and independent programmers.

Group together?

It is worth noting that many members of the AI Alliance currently own their own artificial intelligence products, but none of them have received as much attention from the market as OpenAI and its investment partner Microsoft.

Among them, Meta has also developed its own AI model, but the pace in this area has lagged behind in recent years. Currently,Meta is trying to pass its AI model LLAMA 2As an open source AI system, it occupies a place in the hot AI market.

Furthermore, IBM has also launched its own new Watsonx system。 According to its official introduction, watsonx.ai makes it easy to train, validate, adapt, and deploy generative AI, basic models, and machine learning functions, and build AI applications in a short period of time using a small amount of data.

Last month, IBM also introduced watsonx.governance, which can manage, monitor, and govern AI models from IBM, the open source community, and other model providers.

Since the “huge earthquake” of personnel at OpenAI at the end of November, companies hope to have more AI product suppliers to reduce the risk of cooperating with a single AI vendor, and are exploring whether other AI systems can be used as viable alternatives.

The AI companies that have been trying to catch up but are struggling to surpass OpenAI seem to have ushered in a new opportunity. The timing of the establishment of the AI Alliance is also based on this。 IBM's Gil said:

“It's a different path, a more decentralized approach, but also more resilient because no agency can disrupt the success of this open engine.”

Ritu Jyoti, vice president of IDC Global Artificial Intelligence Group, said that for businesses looking for more partners, the promotion of the AI Alliance may be attractive. But “it will all depend on how well they execute.”

According to IDC's forecast, global enterprises will spend nearly $16 billion on generative AI solutions this year alone, and by 2027, this spending will reach $143 billion.

IDC also said that in the four-year period from 2023 to 2027, the compound annual growth rate of generative AI-related spending will be nearly 13 times that of global IT spending.

The AI Alliance is strategically positioning itself to provide a more distributed and resilient alternative.

Overall, the establishment of the Artificial Intelligence Alliance marks a critical moment in the field of artificial intelligence. As businesses explore risk-reducing alternatives, alliances that emphasize open innovation are a compelling choice.

At the same time,The AI Alliance will also focus on areas such as regulation and securityIt plans to release benchmarking tools for artificial intelligence security and model verification, further strengthening its commitment to reshape the future of artificial intelligence through collective efforts.