News

Linux Foundation's Next Sandbox Project: An Open Source AI Platform

• By David Ramel
• 05/01/2024

Industry giants led by open source vanguard Linux Foundation are working to create viable alternatives to commercial AI solutions.

The Linux Foundation recently launched the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA), the newest "Sandbox Project" of its AI & Data subsidiary. A joint effort between the Linux Foundation and industry players like Intel, Red Hat, Cloudera, Datastax, Domino Data Lab and Hugging Face, the OPEA aims to develop flexible and scalable generative AI systems that harness the best open source innovations from across the ecosystem.

The AI space could use some democratization, as a recent report unveiled that commercial industry AI efforts, thanks to huge and expensive foundation model training, are outperforming academic/government counterparts.

The OPEA aims to address fragmentation in the swiftly evolving generative AI space by collaborating with the industry to standardize components, including frameworks, architecture blueprints and reference solutions that showcase performance, interoperability, trustworthiness and enterprise-grade readiness.

Specifically, the OPEA platform includes:

• A detailed framework of composable building blocks for state-of-the-art generative AI systems including LLMs, data stores, and prompt engines
• Architectural blueprints of retrieval-augmented generative AI component stack structure and end-to-end workflows
• A four-step assessment for grading generative AI systems around performance, features, trustworthiness and enterprise-grade readiness

AI democratization was mentioned by multiple partners, including:

• Red Hat: "As gen AI continues to advance, open source is playing a critical role in the standardization and democratization of models, frameworks, platforms and the tools needed to help enterprises realize value from AI."
• Hugging Face: "Hugging Face's mission is to democratize good machine learning and maximize its positive impact across industries and society. By joining OPEA's open-source consortium to accelerate Generative AI value to enterprise, we will be able to continue advancing open models and simplify GenAI adoption."

Democratization of AI has been a continuing theme since heavy industry investments have steered many AI efforts away from research and development and toward commercial, money-making applications.

"OPEA is emerging at a crucial juncture when GenAI projects, particularly those utilizing RAG [Retrieval-Augmented Generation], are becoming increasingly popular for their capacity to unlock significant value from existing data repositories," said the Linux Foundation in a blog post.

"The swift advancement in GenAI technology, however, has led to a fragmentation of tools, techniques, and solutions. OPEA intends to address this issue by collaborating with the industry to standardize components, including frameworks, architecture blueprints and reference solutions that showcase performance, interoperability, trustworthiness and enterprise-grade readiness."