Nvidia has defended a coalition created to develop and share tools for AI safety and cyber defence and avoid a repeat of the OpenAI Hugging Face hack, when questioned that participants would sidestep it in an AI land grab.
The US chip powerhouse announced the creation of the Open Secure Al Alliance, whose members include leading European tech companies Mistral, Hugging Face, and UiPath, in July this year, just days after the Hugging Face incident.
The coalition is designed to develop and share tools for AI safety and cybersecurity. Other members include Microsoft, Adobe and Dell but not Google, Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI, according to the alliance website.
Mark Weatherford, head of cybersecurity policy, Nvidia, described the genesis of the alliance. He said: “There are a lot of conversations going on in the White House with the president, and in the legislature around creating new laws around regulation, not just AI, but both closed and open models and open source more broadly. At Nvidia we're trying to get in front of this conversation, to get ahead of the conversation, to bring reality to the conversation.”
Speaking at the Open Source summit in Prague, Weatherford defended the alliance, which is now run by the Linux Foundation, a non-profit for open-source software.
When questioned whether the alliance was nothing more than a symbolic gesture and that its members might not be committed to sharing information with rivals amid a global AI land grab, Weatherford said its success depended on its participants but pointed to the sheer volume of participants as an indicator of its status.
The alliance website lists more than 100 leading tech companies.
Weatherford said: “I think the success of the alliance is the collaboration of the people that participate. Yes, there is always going to be market drivers that somebody is going to say ‘well is this the best thing for my company, to collaborate like this and share like this?’”
When asked why OpenAI was not a member of the alliance, Weatherford said: “There are a number of big companies that are not signatories to this. I would just say that there is a queue of a lot of companies that still have not been vetted and approved into the alliance by the Linux Foundation. They are working through that now. I know that the Linux Foundation. They have a queue of hundreds and hundreds of companies that they are vetting into the process.”
He added: “There is a certain vetting process that has to happen. There are some companies, some counties, or some organisations that you may not want to be part of this. “
TechCrunch has previously reported that OpenAI and Google signed the original open letter that led to the group. The letter called on the White House to support open source AI efforts and was signed by over 200 tech companies.
OpenAI, Google and Meta have released open weight models of their own.
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