Montréal AI research institute Mila is building on its existing partnership with Mozilla to make open-source AI more accessible to businesses amid rising costs.
The news: At the Montréal AI conference ALL IN on Thursday, Mila and Mozilla (maker of the Firefox web browser) announced a new initiative backed by the federal government to develop an open-source, “ready-to-use AI package” that businesses and organizations can run independently.
Mozilla is investing an initial $5 million CAD in the initiative, and Montréal-based computing infrastructure company Hypertec will contribute $1 million CAD. Mozilla and Mila said they expect to publish working technical standards within six months.
From the source: “AI today is at a crossroads, where it could be closed and owned by a few, or open and available to every coder, developer, enterprise and nation,” Mozilla president Mark Surman said in a statement.
The context: Mila and Mozilla first announced their research partnership in March. Together, they hope to reduce dependence on closed AI systems and give humans more agency over the data they share with large language models. The AI package they announced on Thursday could allow businesses to integrate the technology into their operations for much less than the cost of frontier models like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. As AI costs rise to a concerning level for some businesses, some are choosing to build in-house models based on open-source models. Legal services and technology giant Thomson Reuters released its own internal model last month, trained on China-developed open-source model Qwen.
Final thought: Mila and Mozilla’s open-source AI bid comes after Canada’s largest for-profit large-language model developer, Cohere, has both made its powerful models open source. While Cohere mainly targets large enterprise clients in regulated industries, Mila and Mozilla say the AI package could be an option for small businesses or charities.
Feature image courtesy ALL IN. Image by Melanie Olmstead.