Technology giants such as IBM Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and Intel Corp., along with more than 40 other organizations, announced this week that they were forming a global initiative focused on the development of artificial intelligence. Advocating an open model for AI, the group is dubbed the AI Alliance.

The move sends a big message, according to theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante (pictured, right). The group boasts an annual $80 billion in research and development spend.

“We see this move as a way for the industry at large to collaborate with each other to ensure responsible growth and address key challenges around governance, chip supply, privacy and to level the playing field relative to Microsoft and OpenAI and the advantage they’ve gained,” Vellante said.

Vellante and theCUBE industry analyst Rob Strechay (left) discussed the news as part of the AnalystANGLE series on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the notable absences from the coalition and how the alliance could serve as a significant step toward advocating for an open model of AI.

The message sent

In addition to the research and development spend, the group also claims 400,000 students supported by academic institutions and a million staff members. When it comes to supercomputing facilities, UC Berkeley is on there, as is Boston University, according to Strechay.

“The number of people who’ve jumped on board with this, in addition to IBM, Meta and Red Hat, really made a lot of sense because these are the people who are building out the platforms, building out the infrastructure that AI is being built on,” he said. “Especially when you think about our power law, and how, as you get out to that long tail and things get more specific, it’s going to be on type of compute and that kind of more open infrastructure, versus all being used in OpenAI.”

Of course, given all the companies that have jumped on board, the absences become all the more notable. Those absences include Nvidia Corp., OpenAI LLC and Microsoft Corp.

“Google’s not there. I think that those four are kind of absent in the fact that this is where, if this really gets steam and starts to go, and this becomes a center of where regulation is taken from and how governments start to look at and lean into, this could be a problem for those organizations that don’t want to at least participate in there,” Strechay said.

Projects being tackled

Among the goals announced by the group is to foster a vibrant AI hardware accelerator ecosystem through the development of essential enabling software technologies. There’s also a goal to create, test and benchmark tools and methods for safe and trusted AI deployment.

“I think that’s very much needed,” Vellante said. “Certainly, with IBM being one of the leaders here, there’s a trust factor that they’ve built up over the years.”

Supporting AI skills and building education is another goal listed. That’s another area that is very important, according to Vellante.

“They’ve got a lot of universities involved in this, advocating for policies that create a healthy, open AI ecosystem,” he said. “In general, the tech industry is not very good at lobbying governments. That said, IBM actually has a lot of experience in that regard, so there’s another possibility.”

Considering everything, the alliance gets high marks, specifically when it comes to the focus on governance, the model specificity and the collaboration across the industry, according to Vellante. It is, however, unclear what the governance structure is at the moment.

“I have no doubt they’ll figure that out, maybe modeling after, similar to the [Cloud Native Computing Foundation],” Vellante said. “But I think, overall, high marks. This is something the industry needs here.”

Strechay agreed, noting that the alliance was “desperately needed.” The CNCF has partnered with some of these other open AI consortiums looking at governance and things of that nature.

“I think that this is key to really bringing transparency and some amount of sanity to the governance over AI so that we have kind of a united voice,” Strechay said. “A little bit more united voice, going back to the governments, because I think that’s going to be the key to when regulation comes down the pipe.”

Here’s the complete AnalystANGLE segment:

Photo: SiliconANGLE