IBM, Meta’s AI Alliance onboards 50+ partners seeking responsible development

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Tech giants IBM (NASDAQ: IBM) and Meta (NASDAQ: META) are collaborating to ensure the safe development of artificial intelligence (AI) amid mounting global regulatory concerns.

Dubbed the AI Alliance, the collaboration seeks to foster greater industry cooperation rather than competition, onboarding over 50 technology companies and universities. At the moment, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD), CERN, Hugging Face, Linux Foundation, Dell Technologies (NASDAQ: DELL), and Red Hat have joined the “action-oriented” alliance.

The AI Alliance is keen on promoting an open community among AI developers, pooling resources to address safety concerns associated with the technology, according to the joint statement. Despite the focus on an open community, membership in the AI Alliance is not limited to firms building open-source AI platforms.

“We believe it’s better when AI is developed openly – more people can access the benefits, build innovative products and work on safety,” said Nick Clegg, President of Global Affairs of Meta. “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.”

The alliance’s goals include the development of benchmarks and evaluation standards to enable safe AI innovation and advancing the open foundation model ecosystem in key use cases.

Others include the advancement of a vibrant AI hardware accelerator ecosystem, deepening AI’s talent pool while pushing for precision regulation for AI by policymakers. Buoyed by a combined research and development fund in excess of $80 billion, Meta and IBM have expressed optimism in achieving the alliance’s objectives.

Aside from the deployment of financial resources by the alliance’s participants, the official disclosure confirms that the AI Alliance will establish working groups for each objective drawn from its membership. To oversee efforts, a governing board and a technical oversight committee will be launched with the statement hinting at future partnerships with governments and nonprofits.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), OpenAI and Anthropic are noticeably absent from the membership list, leading AI developers in their rights, rolling out Bard, ChatGPT, and Claude AI, respectively. In collaboration with other industry players, the trio launched a collaborative effort dubbed The Frontier Forum to pursue responsible AI development.

Pledges for safe AI innovation

As generative AI evolves at frantically, concerned regulators and civil society groups have raised alarm over safety concerns, prompting AI developers to commit to voluntary standards. In July, OpenAI, Google, and Meta pledged their commitment to the guardrails suggested by the U.S. government to prevent misinformation and protect user privacy.

“These commitments are real, and they’re concrete,” U.S. President Joe Biden said. “They’re going to help the industry fulfill its fundamental obligation to Americans to develop safe, secure, and trustworthy technologies that benefit society and uphold our shared values.”

Alongside the voluntary pledges, experts are probing the use of blockchain to mitigate AI risks of copyright infringements and data privacy.

In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek’s coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI.

Watch: Artificial intelligence needs blockchain