Cailean Osborne
Cailean Osborne is a Senior Researcher at the Linux Foundation, where he conducts strategic research and advocacy for promoting openness in AI. He has a PhD in Social Data Science from the University of Oxford, where he researched collaboration dynamics in the open source AI ecosystem. During his PhD, he was a visiting researcher at the Open Source Software Data Analytics Lab at Peking University. Previously, he was the International Policy Lead at the UK Government's Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, where he co-authored the UK's National AI Strategy and served as a UK Delegate at intergovernmental AI governance initiatives at the OECD and Council of Europe. He is based in Berlin, Germany.
Sessions
The proliferation of open large language models (LLMs) is fostering a vibrant ecosystem of research and innovation in artificial intelligence (AI). However, the methods of collaboration used to develop open LLMs both before and after their public release have not yet been comprehensively studied, limiting our understanding of how open LLM projects are initiated, organized, and governed as well as what opportunities there are to foster this ecosystem even further. We address this gap through an exploratory analysis of open collaboration throughout the development and reuse lifecycle of open LLMs, drawing on semi-structured interviews with the developers of 14 open LLMs from grassroots projects, research institutes, startups, and Big Tech companies in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. We make three key contributions to research and practice. First, collaboration in open LLM projects extends far beyond the LLMs themselves, encompassing datasets, benchmarks, open source frameworks, leaderboards, knowledge sharing and discussion forums, and compute partner- ships, among others. Second, open LLM developers have a variety of social, economic, and techno- logical motivations, from democratizing AI access and promoting open science to building regional ecosystems and expanding language representation. Third, the sampled open LLM projects exhibit five distinct organizational models, ranging from single company projects to non-profit-sponsored grassroots projects, which vary in their centralization of control and community engagement strate- gies used throughout the open LLM lifecycle. We conclude with practical recommendations for stakeholders seeking to support the global community building a more open future for AI.I
This Q&A panel will allow attendees the chance to engage in conversation with the paper presenters and to dive into some of the key questions behind the research they have presented as part of the Open Source and AI track.