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The AI Alliance |||

�NASA SMD Workshop — March 2024�

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AI is too important a technology to be shaped by the few

It’s a technology that’s going to transform everybody’s lives, so we all have a stake in its development.

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The AI Alliance brings together organizations, people, and resources to accelerate open innovation, technology development and adoption.

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Members of the AI Alliance

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Build, release and support open technologies for AI, including software, models and related tooling, especially in language and other modalities

essential to the health, sustainability, and prosperity of society.

Enable developer and organizational adoption of open technologies with advocacy, tutorials,

community support, education and training, and use case demonstrations.

Advocate for a vibrant open technology ecosystem in AI to enable broad benefit, address challenges, and

foster trust and safety with organizational and

societal leaders, policy and regulatory bodies, and the public.

Program

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AI Alliance Focus Areas

Focus Area 1: AI skills and exploratory research

Focus Area 2: AI trust, safety, and evaluation

Focus Area 3: Tools for AI application builders

Focus Area 4: Diverse Hardware Enablement

Focus Area 5: Open Foundation Models and Data

Focus Area 6: Policy

Projects in each of six focus areas are the primary construct through which organizations and individuals plan, collaborate, allocate resources, govern. 

Member Choice and Agility: organizations will choose to start or take part in projects in one or more of these six areas based solely on their interest and priorities.

Accelerate open innovation in AI to establish a highly capable open technology baseline for the trusted, transparent, safe, and secure application of AI to business and societal problems.

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A brief project description

Goal of the project

References / Repos (github, web url, etc.)

Example: Meta Purple Llama

Bring together tactics for testing, improving and securing generative AI to support mitigation strategies

https://ai.meta.com/resources/models-and-libraries/llama-downloads/

Example: Meta Responsible Use Guide

Best practices and considerations for building products powered by large language models (LLMs) in a responsible manner

https://ai.meta.com/llama/responsible-use-guide/

Example: IBM contributions to PyTorch for LLM compilation

Build and enable developers with efficient inference capabilities for LLMs in deployment

Status: open source through LF PyTorch foundation

https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch

Example: IBM Policy Lab (white papers and events) for policymaker engagement and advocacy

Inform policymakers on role and importance of open innovation

Public forum that is part of IBM’s government relations program

https://www.ibm.com/policy/about-new/

Example: IBM geospatial foundation model for climate and land use analytics

Enable community with best possible capabilities and enable to build on with example data sets and applications

IBM and NASA-initiated and governed open-source project

https://huggingface.co/ibm-nasa-geospatial

Project Examples

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Website

22,000 visitors, 4,200+ inquiries

  • Response has been global, with inquiries from students to C-level executives
  • 65% were new member inquiries, with interest divided broadly from start-ups to enterprises
    • 20% of new member inquiries came from academic and research institutions
  • 35% were inquiries from individual contributors (e.g., developers, researchers, students) who want to know how they can be part of the Alliance

Media

230+ news stories, from multiple news outlets

Market Sentiment

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What does it mean to be Open?

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What does it mean to be Open? Ex: Software

  • Frequent updates (up to nightly); highly structured release cycles (point releases, major versions, critical patches)
  • Well-defined APIs
  • Well-defined feature roadmaps
  • Incremental contributions
  • Community contributions (e.g., pull requests)
  • Contributions from many contributors can be merged and reconciled
  • Almost any developer can, in principle, contribute

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What does it mean to be Open? Ex: An Organization

Utilize projects coming through the AI Alliance

Step 2

Contribute toward

AI Alliance projects

Step 3

Spearhead new project work in collaboration with AI Alliance members

Step 4

Facilitate broader community involvement while providing significant contribution across focus areas of the AI Alliance

Step 5

Define �your organization’s strategy and priorities for open innovation and open science

Step 1

Role in the AI Alliance

As a user

As a contributor

As a market leader & AI Alliance member

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What does it mean to be Open? Ex: Models & Tools

Role in the AI Alliance

As a user

As a contributor

As a market leader & AI Alliance member

Four elements:�

  1. The data processing pipelines
  2. The model weights
  3. The tooling around the models
  4. The best practices

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What does it mean to be Open? Ex: Hardware Choice

Role in the AI Alliance

As a user

As a contributor

As a market leader & AI Alliance member

A challenge not just of functionality, but reference stack and deployment patterns, up stack integration and developer experience, and the gravity of the Cuda ecosystem to researchers and engineers who are building models and software optimizations.

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Open models & data… Join our growing community to share gaps of current models, and collaborate toward solutions

AI Safety & Evaluation… Advance the state of the art for evaluation in prioritized domain areas

Hardware optionality… Enable or improve portability across NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, IBM AIU, etc

Ways to get involved

https://thealliance.ai/