What's the opposite of OpenAI? IBM and Meta devise plan that includes 50 members.
On Tuesday, IBM and Meta announced the AI Alliance, an international coalition of over 50 organizations including AMD, Intel, NASA, CERN, and Harvard University that aims to advance "open innovation and open science in AI." In other words, the goal is to collectively promote alternatives to closed AI systems currently in use by market leaders such as OpenAI and Google with ChatGPT and Duet. In the AI Alliance news release, OpenAI isn't mentioned by name—and OpenAI is not part of the alliance, nor is Google. But over the past year, clear battle lines have been drawn between companies like OpenAI that keep AI model weights (neural network files) and data about how the models are created to themselves and companies like Meta, which provide AI model weights for others to run on their own hardware and allow others to build derivative models based on their research. "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," writes the alliance. Companies like Meta may see a potential path ahead where firms like OpenAI or Google achieve a kind of entrenchment in the AI assistant market using closed models that lack transparency, and it appears that they want to pool together enough weight to oppose that path. It's an ideological battle, with the goal of releasing models openly (which isn't a requisite for the group, as you'll see below) and openly sharing research in how AI models are…