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GenAI Summit 2024 Kicks Off with a Call for Open-Source AGI

• By John K. Waters
• 05/30/2024

The GenAI Summit 2024 kicked off in San Francisco this week with a keynoter declaring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) belongs to the community as open-source technology.

"Like music and mathematics," Sri Ambati, co-founder and CEO of H2O.ai, told his audience,
"AGI is generational wealth. It belongs to the community, and in open source. Open source gives it the most freedom and the most innovative capacity."

Ambati's company, H2O.ai, provides open-source tools for machine learning (ML) and predictive analytics. The company's stated goal is to "democratize AI by building user-friendly tools and fostering collaboration to make AI accessible to everyone." The company focuses on ease of use and accessibility, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML), scalability, and performance.

H2O.ai recently released its latest open-weight small language model, H2O-Danube2-1.8B, under an Apache 2.0 license. According to the company, the model is "ideal for fine-tuning on domain-specific datasets, economically efficient for inference and training, and easily embedded on edge devices like mobile phones and drones."

"One of our core missions is to bring predictive AI and generative AI closer together," Ambati said, "because the value of generative AI is in productivity gains, but it is predictive AI that's going to bring orders of magnitude improvements in outcomes. When you can predict the future and tell a great story, that’s when you can bring people together to follow you on that journey."

Uniting generative and predictive AI is where enterprises will see the maximum return on their investments in the technology, Ambati said. "That's where you'll be able to see the forest, and not just the trees," he said.

This year's conference, underway this week in in San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, is the second annual event organized by GPT Dao, a global generative AI community. According to event organizers, this year's summit drew an estimated 10,000 attendees and 300 exhibitors. The list of exhibitors at this year's conference includes Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. (A complete list is available on the conference website.)

("Dao" stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Dao's operate based on smart contracts executed on a decentralized network, typically a blockchain, which allows for decentralized decision making and control over the organization’s assets and operations.)

The list of workshops at this year's event includes building an advanced generative AI assistant utilizing an advanced Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technique powered by Anthropic Claude 3 on Amazon Bedrock; a hands-on, build-your-own RAG-enabled chatbot workshop using NVIDIA NIM; and an overview of common use cases for IBM's Watsonx.

Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., next door to Stanford University and 45 minutes from the University of California at Berkeley, GPT Dao was "spontaneously formed," the group says, by local students, professors, and entrepreneurs with an interest in the potential of open-sourced AI technology. The group's tag line on LinkedIn reads, "Empowering everyone to open science and humanities in the age of generative AI."

GPT Dao provides a range of services to its community, including Web3 and AI project incubation, GPT investment research education, and AI infrastructure services. It also provides a platform for community governance designed to allow members to propose, discuss, and vote on changes, new features, and/or initiatives. It also provides a decentralized crowdfunding platform that allows anyone to invest in or contribute to a project, regardless of their location or financial status.