The Linux Foundation has added the Open Model Initiative (OMI) to its ever-expanding portfolio to help pave the way for more ethical LLMs.

The OMI was founded in June 2024 by Invoke, Civitai, and Comfy Org with the goal of bringing together developers, researchers, and enterprises to advance open and permissive-based licensing for AI models and the technology surrounding them. Permissive licensing should make it easier for community members to participate in the development of these models without downstream obligations.

To make this a reality, OMI will be governed by a community-led steering committee, conduct a survey to collect feedback for future model research, and develop a transparent dataset for training. OMI hopes to release an alpha version of the model by the end of the year.

The big concern, according to Abhigyan Malik, Practice Director of data, analytics, and AI at the Everest Group, is “Developing LLMs is highly compute-intensive and has cost big tech giants and start-ups billions in capital expenditure to achieve the scale they currently have with their open source and proprietary LLMs."

Malik also believes the practice of using ethical data to train models will grow increasingly more difficult because the more popular sources are changing their policies regarding privacy and usage.

Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, said of this initiative, "The Linux Foundation is deeply committed to fostering open and collaborative development around AI."

He continued, "With the Open Model Initiative, we are taking a significant step towards making AI accessible and beneficial for everyone, building an environment where creativity and progress in AI can thrive without barriers."

Read more about the joint effort between the Linux Foundation and OMI.