Nvidia Forms Alliance to Back Open-Source A.I. Amid Debate Over Safety

Nvidia Forms Alliance to Back Open-Source A.I. Amid Debate Over Safety

Nvidia said that it had created a coalition to work on “open-source” safety and cybersecurity tools for artificial intelligence with other big technology companies, including Microsoft and SpaceX.

The announcement on Monday comes days after OpenAI said that two of its A.I. models went rogue and successfully hacked into a digital library for A.I., reigniting a debate over whether it is better to freely share the technology, or whether it should be closely controlled by a small group of experts.

The new alliance is being formed after Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, set off an industrywide defense of open-source A.I., particularly as so-called frontier models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic push the edge of A.I. abilities.

Mr. Huang’s defense of open-source technology added a new wrinkle to the debate over the safety of A.I. models made by Chinese companies. Hugging Face, the company that was attacked by OpenAI’s A.I. models last week, said it used a Chinese-made A.I. model to protect itself.

Nvidia’s alliance, called the Open Secure AI Alliance, includes Dell and a range of smaller companies. It will also use open-source tools to address and disclose software vulnerabilities.

“The United States and its partners now face a choice in A.I. security: whether the defenses that protect our infrastructure will sit inside a few opaque systems or be built on open models,” Nvidia wrote in a blog post.

The alliance is a reminder of Mr. Huang and Nvidia’s leadership in A.I. The chipmaker relies on open-source models — A.I. that is free to use, change and share — to increase demand for its hardware, as well as the tightly controlled models made by OpenAI and Anthropic.

That position is shared by companies like Microsoft, which sell cloud computing services to people and companies using open-source models. Silicon Valley start-ups have also argued that restrictions on open-source A.I. would limit their abilities to compete with industry leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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