Namaste Yogis. Welcome to the Blockchain & AI Forum, where your technology questions are answered, mostly correct! Here no question is too mundane. As a bonus, a proverb is also included. Today’s question comes from Butch, in Arkansas, USA. Butch wants to know, what is the Artificial Intelligence Alliance?
Butch, you came to the right place. The Artificial Intelligence Alliance (AI Alliance) is an organization with an impressive membership roster. The AI Alliance consists of technology creators, developers and adopters collaborating to advance safe, responsible AI rooted in open innovation, according to their official statement. Who are the members? Click the link here: https://thealliance.ai/
AI Alliance membership is diverse and as expected concentrated in the tech sector. There are numerous prestigious universities, including U.C. Berkeley, Dartmouth, and the University of Texas. Moreover, the AI Alliance includes foreign universities in Japan and one in Dubai, exclusively for AI. Holy, big brain, Batman! Not surprisingly AI Alliance members are generally from the business community. For example, you will find Meta, Intel, IBM, Oracle, and many other household corporate names.
What does the AI Alliance do? The AI Alliance has three focus areas. Let’s take one at a time.
Responsible and Scalable AI. AI Alliance has set a goal of creating benchmarks, tools, and methodologies to ensure and evaluate high-quality and safe AI. The AI Alliance will also be an advocate for AI safety and security.
Open Foundation Models. The AI Alliance says it will focus on responsibly advancing 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.
Diverse AI Hardware. AI Alliance claims its members will collaborate on the benchmarking, optimization, and adaptation of AI workloads to advance a diverse set of hardware. AI Alliance reports it will focus on scalability, platform adaptation, and advanced power, energy, and carbon modeling. Benchmarks and metrics developed for model inference, fine-tuning and energy consumption of large-scale AI workloads will also be contributed to the open-source community.
Butch, you ask in what way do the members contribute? I’ll give you three of the eight ways AI Alliance members can contribute. We start with a pledge to deploy benchmarks, 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. Second AI Alliance members agree to 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, human health, and beyond. And third, AI Alliance members say they will support global AI skills building, education, and exploratory research. Nothing short of ambitious!
The actual working of the AI Alliance is fascinating and deserves a short explanation. The AI Alliance will divide the work and its members into groups with specific tasks. To direct the work, the AI Alliance announced it will establish a governing board and technical oversight committee. The board and technical committee will establish overall project standards and guidelines. There is no mention of an Executive Director, dedicated staff, nor explicit political activities, yet. However, I am confident the AI Alliance will eventually establish a Washington, D.C. presence to lobby the executive branch, Congress, and regulators. That’s how it works, folks!
Butch, I hope I answered your question. Remember what they say in Italy: When you finish the game, the king and pawn end up in the same box.
Until next time,
Yogi Nelson
Blockchain & AI Forum 