Technology heavyweights such as IBM and Meta have joined forces to found a new industry group focussed on open source artificial intelligence work, known as the “AI Alliance.”

The coalition, which has launched today, aims to bring together organisations across industry, research, education, and government to support open innovation in artificial intelligence amid its rapid development.

The AI Alliance plans to start or improve projects through a series of actions. These include advancing open foundation models with diverse modalities, deploying benchmarks and evaluation tools for AI’s responsible development, and hosting events which highlight how open AI technology is being used for good.

While the open sourcing of artificial intelligence is an objective for numerous companies, people, and projects, the AI Alliance believes that “more collaboration and information sharing will help the community innovate faster and more inclusively.”

The AI Alliance’s founding members—of which there are over 50—include the likes of Intel, AMD, Dell Technologies, Oracle, CERN, the Linux Foundation, Harvard University, Imperial College London, and more.

The group is set to begin its work by creating member-driven working groups across its areas of focus, as well as establishing a governing board and technical oversight committee.

Speaking on open source, AI, and the new coalition, Lisa Su, the CEO and chair of AMD, remarked: “The history of our industry highlights how open, standards-based development leveraging the capabilities of the entire industry both accelerate innovation and ensure technology advances have the largest positive impact.

“By embracing open standards and transparency across all aspects of the rapidly developing AI ecosystem, we can help ensure the transformational benefits of responsible AI are broadly available.

“We are proud to join with other industry leaders as a founding member of the AI Alliance and look forward to working together to ensure the rapid advances in AI are a force for positive change.”

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Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, commented further: “The AI Alliance is another milestone in the process of providing for openly shareable software, data, and other assets essential to the development of transparent, advanced and trustworthy AI.

“Open collaborative processes and open governance are essential to these efforts and working with our PyTorch Foundation, LF AI and Data Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, we look forward to participating in and assisting the Alliance by providing a neutral home for essential elements of the AI ecosystem.”