AI Ecosystem– AI Alliance

Meta is the senior partner.

• Meta is moving to cement its grip on the emerging AI ecosystem by partnering with a range of “have-not” AI companies to increase support of open-source where its foundation model is the industry standard.
• Meta is leading the AI Alliance (see here) which includes IBM and around 50 other AI companies, universities and tech companies whose mission is to build open technologies, enable developers and advocate for open innovation with regulators and governments.
• At the heart of the AI Alliance is Meta’s LlaMa foundation model upon which everything is based.
• This allows the open-source community a base from which to start creating as foundation models are both difficult and expensive to create.
• However, what it also does is lock the open-source community into Meta’s foundation model as once a model has been trained using one foundation model as its starting point, it is impossible to switch without retraining from scratch.
• The AI Alliance will work as most alliances of this nature with a technical oversight committee made up from the members that sets the roadmap and then a series of working groups that create the specifications of different areas.
• These types of alliances often end up with infighting and disagreements as members’ commercial agendas differ meaning that they prefer certain specifications over others.
• What results is often a messy compromise which is optimal for no one meaning that an offering developed by one company is often superior in terms of performance.
• However, from a developer perspective, being dependent on one company has its drawbacks as many developers have found when basing their businesses on the Apple ecosystem.
• Historically, the world of AI development has been very open and collaborative but now that large sums are money are involved, the AI industry is beginning to close down and be more secretive.
• However, I think that this background gives the AI Alliance a chance to be more harmonious and productive than many similar alliances that have gone before it.
• The main problem is that outside of Meta, the AI Alliance is a list of also-rans in the AI industry and none of the other big players have signed up.
• This means that the AI Alliance is just another contender in the coming battle for the AI ecosystem where Apple and Google have yet to make their move although it appears that Google is almost ready as it was supposed to showcase something this week, but this has been delayed by a month or so.
• Meta now needs to expand the AI Alliance greatly in terms of numbers as the network effect is crucial when it comes to building a flourishing and stable ecosystem that will stand the test of time.
• Landing one of the other major players would also be a major boost but at the moment these companies all think that they will make it on their own.
• The race has barely begun but already there have been thrills and spills as OpenAI has squandered its early lead and Meta has closed some of the gap and doubled down on its open-source strategy with this alliance.
• As it was in the smartphone ecosystem, the early leaders were not always the winners and there remains everything to play for.