What the AI revolution means for Open Source, Open Tech and Open Societies

In the last year we saw the rise of AI systems like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Dall-E and others. Large Language Models like GPT are enabling a lot of new innovative features and products which will revolutionise the world.

But this large autoregressive language models come with a lot of challenges that can have negative effects on the Open Source and Open Tech community. For example it’s unclear if in the future everyone will have access to the same ML models and training data. Can students, startups and open source people build innovative new products using AI in the same way the open source communities build Open Code and Open Tech. How can we make sure that the AI system are not discriminating underrepresented minorities? What is the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of this new big AI systems? 

This talk will discuss the current challenges around AI. In the second half it covers the new innovative local and open source AI features that the Nextcloud community is building. At the end the talk looks into the new Ethical AI framework and what it means for existing SaaS AI solutions and the open source local alternatives. It  also covers the ongoing discussion to define an Open Source AI definition in the OSI community.