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The Story: Last week, tech giants IBM and Meta launched the AI Alliance, a group of companies and research institutions that support open-source AI models.

Joining IBM and Meta are companies such as Intel, AMD, Oracle, Cornell University, the National Science Foundation, and more than fifty others. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Belle Lin, senior vice president at IBM and director of IBM Research Darío Gil explained that the alliance wants to highlight AI companies that haven’t received the same publicity as OpenAI.

For many of these AI companies, he says, “revenues from enterprise technology are driving much of their growth.” According to a Data Corp forecast, enterprise tech companies will spend $16 billion on generative AI solutions this year. By 2027, companies are expected to be spending nearly 10x that number.

And the recent OpenAI debacle has demonstrated to businesses that having only one player in the AI game leads to more risk. This has motivated businesses to explore working with more providers of AI tools, emphasizing the value of open-source models.

The timing of AI Alliance’s launch announcement was no accident. IBM’s Gil said, “This other way, it’s a much more distributed approach, but much more resilient, because no given institution can derail the success of the open engine.”

Gil also believes the world of AI will not be won by a few lucky companies. Instead, he believes there will be many players that can win and become successful in the long term. They just need help in getting the right exposure, and that’s what the AI Alliance aims to do.

Expert Take: Vardan Gattani, principal at 645 Ventures, explains the value of open-source AI models:

Although open-source can give businesses and developers advantages, Gattani doesn’t believe they will be able to compete with closed models yet: “I think open-source can potentially provide advantages where they are our first choice for both enterprises as well as developers, but time being, I think there’s just a tremendous amount of adoption in the closed domain.”

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