Openness in AI promotes collaborative innovations and inclusive technology growth
By Allen Guo
General Manager for the Philippines
Alibaba Cloud Intelligence
2023 witnessed remarkable advances in AI, yet navigating the fine line between swift innovation and the need for careful management to mitigate risks continues to be a key issue. By 2024, with the EU’s implementation of its AI rulebook and ASEAN’s similar efforts, there’s a clear global emphasis on balancing AI innovation with necessary safeguards.
Echoing this trend, the Philippine government, through the Department of Trade and Industry, positioned itself as an AI Center of Excellence, emphasizing that its National AI Strategy prioritizes population well-being, enterprise productivity, and competitive economic standing. This strategy encompasses digitalization, workforce development, regulation, and R&D, aimed at fostering economic growth and maintaining the country’s competitiveness.
There is already a growing hunger for AI across a wide range of industries, developers and businesses. As enabling technology platforms, cloud providers should do what they can to help customers learn from and use the latest technology and tools. AI, and in particular, generative AI is possibly the hottest ticket in town and we’ve seen phenomenal interest in our own large language model.
But we have to find a way to strike a balance between enablement, growth and safety. They are all connected and not exclusive and open source has to be considered a valid proposition to what will be an on-going debate about methodologies.
Alibaba Cloud has long been an advocate of open source and supporting transparency when applying AI. In 2022, we launched our own cloud-based open-source AI model community called ModelScope. The platform has given access to 2.8 million developers, access to over 2300 AI models within a short period of 12 months.
By December 2023, Alibaba Cloud has already open sourced its LLMs with parameters ranging from 1.8 billion, 7 billion, 14 billion to 72 billion, as well as its multi-modal LLMs with audio and visual understanding capabilities.
A principled approach
Without open source, we wouldn’t have had the ground-breaking development of generative AI. Still, of course, this is a fast-developing space where commercial propositions will grow and proprietary systems will emerge. If IT history has taught us anything, innovators and entrepreneurs will want to land grab ideas and software markets and niches. We are in the business of enabling that invention and development but believe those ideas and products will be more robust and grow quicker through an open-source community.
The public sector and industry organizations will have to continue collaborating on regulatory guidelines, but in the meantime, the industry continues to move forward at an incredible pace. Recognizing this, we have our guiding principles for our AI development to make technology “available, reliable, credible and controllable.” We invested in technologies such as privacy-preserving computation and explainable AI to increase our algorithm’s transparency and fairness, protect our users’ privacy, and enhance data security.
Earlier last year, we announced that we aim to be the most open in the era of AI to make it easier and affordable for everyone to develop and use AI. Generative AI is already being used across various organizations, from big luxury brands, reshaping online retail experiences to digital intelligence and AI enhancing supply chain agility and resilience. We are also working with industry pioneers and start-ups to establish next-generation experiences in gaming, music, and retail.
The point is that ecosystems can drive innovation, using AI to enable businesses to think beyond their traditional boundaries. Open source prevents lock-in with proprietary systems and ensures a lower barrier to entry for innovators and start-ups. It encourages experimentation and collaboration at lower costs and within robust communities, opening up opportunities with less risk.
At a time when business talk is consistently touching on flexibility and resilience, open source can provide a willing platform to scale at cost. It almost certainly has to be part of the mix, a serious factor within a more extensive conversation about the future of AI. The challenge for all countries and companies is how to engage, enable, and manage AI now. There is already significant momentum, and the tech industry has to play its part in taking responsibility for being the guardians of AI for today and tomorrow.
