The AI in 800 Words column explores artificial intelligence and its relevance to research libraries through brief interviews that give attention to opportunities, challenges, governance, ethics, and the research enterprise.
In this installment, I speak with Sayeed Choudhury, associate dean for digital infrastructure and director of the Open Source Programs Office at the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries as well as executive director of the Open Forum for AI.
Tell us about Open Forum for AI (OFAI). Who did you make it for?
We launched OFAI in 2024 to bend the arc toward human-centered AI, and to grow the influence of the academic and nonprofit sectors. OFAI emphasizes openness as a design principle for AI as infrastructure.
What motivated you to start OFAI?
The overarching vision is that AI should build human agency rather than replace it. Instead of “human in the loop,” we should have “AI in the loop” so that human-inspired use cases and feedback drive AI evaluation and development.
How did you get started?
At its start, OFAI was led by Carnegie Mellon. The university has a culture of research on information infrastructure and a history as one of the birthplaces of AI, so it was a good locus for the initiative. Our first partners came from the CURIOSS network of open source program offices, but we have expanded since then and built additional partnerships.
For example, we built on community effort around the Open Source AI Definition. Since then, we’ve reached out to other universities and nonprofits. Because the private sector offers valuable insights, we have a group of individual fellows from that world, but none of their companies are full-fledged partners.
What problems were you trying to solve?
We wanted to: ensure that the people who use and are affected by AI have agency and influence in not only its evaluation, but also its development; balance the triad of university, government, and industry, which were instrumental in the development of the internet and the web; adopt an integrated approach spanning research, technical prototypes, community engagement, policy recommendations, and workforce development; improve transparency, interpretability, and accountability for AI models, companies, and deployers; and support the development of international AI policies, rules, and norms.
Who have you worked with along the way that has changed your thinking? Who has helped you improve or move your project forward?
One of the main benefits of OFAI is the intentional, creative tension between various sectors, roles, and forms of expertise. In contrast to any one sector or set of organizations talking among themselves, OFAI has become a highly productive forum for cross-pollination.
For example, I’ve learned a great deal about the venture finance sector, and how their interests can and often do align with OFAI’s goals. Certain VCs see the value of looking at advances made by startups that rely on open, smaller models and agents. Most recently, we’ve been thinking with OpenMined about the intriguing prospect of ensembles or fusions of proprietary and open-source models.
If half a dozen people would help you for a month, what would you most want to try to accomplish together?
OFAI made the right bet on open source becoming a critical part of the AI conversation. So for this hypothetical month (and for our real two-year roadmap), I would want to find partners to help advance openness in AI and tackle questions like: how do we build on our existing technical infrastructure, such as DARE?
The Chinese AI ecosystem has essentially designed and built an open stack for AI. How do we in North America position ourselves relative to their stack? 98% of all software has open-source components within it, and 80% is released as open source. What is the equivalent for AI? And how do we get to that equivalent?
What keeps you up at night with respect to AI or anything else?
On one level, AI still feels like massive hype. But if you go below the surface, there are foundational changes that are rapidly taking place. It’s hard to keep up, which is one of the core reasons we formed OFAI as a forum for information sharing and dissemination.
There is also an air of inevitability about AI as defined by Big Tech, for which OFAI is trying to provide a counternarrative: one that embraces and respects the concerns that many people share. Just look at the recent commencement ceremonies, where so many graduates booed at the mention of AI! We need to give them—and everyone else—a tangible opportunity to have their voices heard.
Is there anything else you are doing, reading, or listening to that you’d like to share with our audience?
I live near a park and I often dog-sit for a friend. If I didn’t have the opportunity to walk in that park with her dog, I’d be missing something essential. I also spend a good part of my day just petting my cat. His purr is soothing.
Whatever it is, do what you can to make time to get away. We are inundated. Go take a walk. It’s more important than ever to go on a run, or meet for coffee. Remember that the humans we need in the loop are each other.
