M+E Connections

Looking to establish best practices and advance public understanding of artificial intelligence (AI), some of America’s biggest tech companies have banded together to form a new alliance: the Partnership on AI.

IBM, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft are the founders of the nonprofit organization, which aims to bring together academics and specialists in the AI field to weigh in on future policies and ethics behind the use of AI technologies. The group’s stated goals covers collaborative research on the benefits and drawbacks of AI, and the sharing of AI advances among stakeholders.

“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 healthcare, financial services, commerce, and the Internet of Things,” said Francesca Rossi, AI ethics researcher for IBM Research.

“This partnership will provide consumer and industrial users of cognitive systems a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century — one that will foster collaboration between people and machines to solve some of the world’s most enduring problems — in a way that is both trustworthy and beneficial.”

The group stresses it will not push its agenda on lawmakers or other policymakers, and each founding member has committed to contributing financial and research resources toward the endeavor, with findings and recommendations being shared with academics and industry experts.

The group is currently in collaborative discussions with several professional and scientific organizations, including the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), among others.

“We see great value ahead with harnessing AI advances in numerous areas, including health, education, transportation, public welfare, and personal empowerment,” said Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft Research. “We’re extremely pleased with how early discussions among colleagues blossomed into a promising long-term collaboration.

“Beyond folks in industry, we’re thrilled to have other stakeholders at the table, including colleagues in ethics, law, policy, and the public at large. We look forward to working arm-in-arm on best practices and on such important topics as ethics, privacy, transparency, bias, inclusiveness, and safety.”

Photo: Founding members of the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence from left: Eric Horvitz, Microsoft; Francesca Rossi, IBM; Yann LeCun, Facebook and Mustafa Suleyman, Google/DeepMind. Not pictured is Ralf Herbrich, Amazon.

(Jon Simon/Feature Photo Service for IBM)