Demonstrating the increasing industry excitement around artificial intelligence, Amazon.com, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft are forming a nonprofit organization to increase understanding of AI technologies and formulate best practices.
Members of the Partnership on AI will conduct and publish research under an open source license in areas such as ethics, fairness, and inclusivity, according IBM, which announced the nonprofit on Wednesday. Other aspects to be researched include transparency, privacy, interoperability, trust, reliability, and interaction between people and AI systems.
"Over the past five years, we've seen tremendous advances in the deployment of AI and cognitive computing technologies, ranging from useful consumer apps to transforming some of the world's most complex industries, including health care, financial services, commerce and the internet of things,” said Francesca Ross, an IBM AI ethics researcher.
Partnership for AI has reached out to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence for possible collaboration. There are no plans to lobby any government or policymaking bodies.