Last Tuesday, Meta and IBM launched an AI Alliance in order to promote “open innovation and open science” AI development. The Alliance’s members notably include Dell Technologies, Sony, AMD, Intel, Oracle, CERN, NASA, Cornell University, Dartmouth, Hugging Face, Imperial College London, the National Science Foundation, and others. Its members notably do not include Microsoft, Google, or OpenAI. Which raises the question: just how impactful will this new alliance really be? 
So far, the tech world can largely be divided into two camps: the open and the closed. As the name suggests, the major difference between these two is that while the former believes that the technology behind AI should be made widely accessible to the public, the latter disagrees. At the heart of this debate is the concern over safety. And also profit. 
Most companies that are part of the AI alliance believe that artificial intelligence should be made open-source and should be accessible to the public.
As for Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft, they have created their own group called the Frontier Model Forum. 
“The platform that will win will be the open one,” said Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, in an interview with The New York Times. 
Going by what they’ve released so far, their aims and objectives seem to be extremely broad. 
So, what exactly is this new alliance? 
According to Kyle Wiggers, a senior reporter at TechCrunch, it’s just another version of the Partnership on AI coalition created years ago. The Alliance lists similar goals to its predecessor and has many of the same members. According to a press release, the Alliance plans to “utilize pre-existing collaborations”, which presumably includes the Partnership on AI.
As for The Guardian, it claims that the new AI alliance “is likely [made] to lobby regulators to ensure new legislation works in their favor.” This is a view that many industry experts seem to share.
In contrast, LeCun wrote on X (formerly known as  Twitter) “In a future where AI systems are poised to constitute the repository of all human knowledge and culture, we need the platforms to be open source and freely available so that everyone can contribute to them. Openness is the only way to make AI platforms reflect the entirety of human knowledge and culture.” This paints a different picture than what the critics of the alliance are claiming. 
It should also be noted that Nvidia, the dominant provider of AI chips and owner of multiple open-source projects of their own, is not part of the AI Alliance while both Intel and AMD, other chip manufacturers, are. This has led people to speculate whether Nvidia’s decision was due to a perceived conflict of interest with the other manufacturers, or whether it was out of support for the tech giants that opted out of the alliance. There are also those who speculate that this could signal increasing tensions between the AI hardware companies.
As for what the alliance will actually end up achieving, we’ll just have to wait and see. 
I’d like to end the episode with this quote from Wiggers: “But without the participation of so many major AI industry players — and lacking deadlines or even concrete objectives — can the AI Alliance succeed? What would success look like, even? […] The vast number of competing interests [among its members] — from healthcare networks (Cleveland Clinic) to insurance providers (Roadzen) — won’t make it easy for the Alliance’s members to coalesce around a single, united front. And for all their talk of openness, IBM and Meta aren’t exactly the poster children for the future that the Alliance’s release depicts — casting doubt on their sincerity.”
Thank you for listening to The Old and the New and see you next episode.