Linux Foundation Looks To Become More Involved With AI Models, Welcomes OMI

With all the craze around "AI" and hoping to foster more open-source AI models, the Linux Foundation has welcomed the Open Model Initiative (OMI) into its umbrella of open-source initiatives to help foster high quality, openly-licensed AI models.

The Open Model Initiative was recently formed by Invoke, Comfy Org, and Civitai as a community-driven effort to promote the development and adoption of openly-licensed AI models for image, video, and audio generation. This community initiative came about over the summer to help advance open-source AI models while now is becoming part of the Linux Foundation to further their cause.

The Linux Foundation announced today on OMI joining the fold:

"Today, the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, is excited to welcome the Open Model Initiative (OMI) to the Linux Foundation community. The OMI aims to foster the creation and adoption of high-quality, openly licensed AI models that push creativity forward, are free to use, and meet the growing demands for open source AI solutions.

Established in response to licensing decisions that create barriers for enterprise adoption, OMI is focused on training and developing AI models under irrevocable open licenses without deletion clauses or recurring costs for access. Formed through a joint effort by founding organizations Invoke, CivitAI, and Comfy Org, and with widespread support from community players like Wand and Sentient Foundation, the OMI is now an official open source foundation hosted by the Linux Foundation and will be governed by a community-led Steering Committee."

As part of the Linux Foundation, the OMI will be working to establish a governance framework and working groups, create shared standards to enhance model interoperability and metadata practices, develop a transparent dataset for training and captioning, complete an alpha test model for targeted red teaming, and release an alpha version of a new model with fine-tuning scripts before the end of 2024.

Those wishing to learn more can see the Linux Foundation press release. There doesn't appear to be too much yet in the way of code but the Open Model Initiative repositories can be found on GitHub.