Meta, IBM Launch AI Alliance to Foster Responsible AI Research
By Movieguide® Contributor
Meta and IBM launched an advocacy group called AI Alliance to promote the safe and responsible development of AI technology.
“The AI Alliance is focused on fostering open community and enabling developers and researchers to accelerate responsible innovation an AI while ensuring scientific rigor, trust, safety, security, diversity and economic competitiveness,” the group explained.
“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,” AI Alliance continued.
The group comprises a large variety of international companies and organizations invested in the field, including Intel, CERN, Sony, The University of Notre Dame and Yale University.
Up to this point, AI has been developed largely as closed-source technology, meaning that while it is available to the public, the source code behind the technology, including the models it is trained on, is kept hidden.
The AI Alliance argues that for AI development to be as safe and responsible as possible, the technology needs to become open source, as this allows for the most amount of oversight possible.
“The future of AI is approaching a fork in the road. One path is dangerously close to creating consolidated control of AI, driven by a small number of companies that have a closed proprietary vision for the AI industry,” said IBM SVP Darío Gil.
“Down the other path lies a broad, open road: a highway that belongs to the many, not the few, and is protected by the guardrails that we create together,” Gil continued.
While the Alliance has yet to provide concrete details on how it would monitor open sourced development of AI, it explains that making the technology less secretive would protect against an AI arms race.
“Open-source is the only way to keep non-open-source in check,” Clément Delangue, co-founder and CEO of machine learning company Hugging Face, said on X, formerly Twitter. “Without it, you’ll have extreme concentration of power/knowledge/secrecy with 1,000x the risk. Open-source is more the solution than the problem for AI risks.”
While AI companies like Microsoft’s OpenAI may not be open source, the leaders of these companies agree that the field needs intense oversight to protect from an AI catastrophe.
Earlier this year, Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, appeared before Congress, urging them to regulate the fast-moving industry.
“We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models,” Altman told Congress, suggesting a licensing program run by the government along with intense testing. “[This] combination of licensing and testing requirements could be applied to the development and release of AI models above a certain threshold of capabilities.”
In response, President Biden signed an executive order at the end of October to increase the government regulation of AI. However, this act focused on the consumer experience and job market rather than the development of the technology itself.
While the AI Alliance is a positive step in the safety of AI development, the group itself admits that much more is needed to ensure a safe future with the technology.
“While the AI Alliance is attempting to solve many of the foreseeable problems created by AI, we haven’t yet started to grapple with creating truly equitable access to data,” the Alliance’s AI expert, Srinivas Mukkamala, told TheStreet. “The AI Alliance isn’t the silver bullet that will be able to address all of the risks and inequity of AI.”
“We need to have more alliances that just this on tackling AI governance an use,” he continued, “and ensure we are not concentrating power into the hands of the lucky few.”
Movieguide® previously reported:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared before Congress earlier this week alongside other leaders in AI to advise lawmakers on the regulation of AI technologies.
Altman believes that the current tech boom has the potential to be a “printing press moment” forever changing human life. However, he recognizes the risks of the current approach to innovation in the tech industry and is encouraging lawmakers to regulate the boom.
“We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models,” Altman said in his opening remarks.
IBM’s vice president, Christina Montgomery, also appeared before Congress warning against Silicon Valley’s longstanding mantra of ‘move fast and break things.’
“The era of AI cannot be another era of ‘move fast and break things,” Montgomery said. “We don’t have to slam the brakes on innovation either.”
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