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Building open-source AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) drives innovation across society, economies and science. We argue for the importance of building AI technology according to open-source principles to foster accessibility, collaboration, responsibility and interoperability.

The computer science community has a long tradition of embracing open-source principles. However, companies increasingly restrict access to AI innovations. An example is OpenAI, which was founded to make scientific research openly available but which eventually restricted access to research findings. Although such a strategy reflects a company’s legitimate incentive to obtain financial returns, such protection increases concentration of power, restricting access to AI technology. Further down the road, concentrated power could lead to growing inequality in AI research, education and public use. Here we discuss why proprietary AI technology should be complemented by open-source AI across the essential components for building AI technology: datasets, source codes and models.

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Fig. 1: Key approaches to promote open-source AI technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC), University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Yash Raj Shrestha

  2. Department of Management, Technology and Economics, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Georg von Krogh

  3. ETH AI Center, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Georg von Krogh

  4. Institute of AI in Management, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany

    Stefan Feuerriegel

  5. Munich Center for Machine Learning, Munich, Germany

    Stefan Feuerriegel

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  1. Yash Raj Shrestha
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  2. Georg von Krogh
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  3. Stefan Feuerriegel
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Correspondence to
Stefan Feuerriegel.

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Nature Computational Science thanks Giada Pistilli and the other, anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Shrestha, Y.R., von Krogh, G. & Feuerriegel, S. Building open-source AI.
Nat Comput Sci (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-023-00540-0

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  • Published: 26 October 2023

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-023-00540-0

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