The session, Innovating Together: Harnessing Open-Source AI for Inclusive Economic Development, examined how open-source AI can strengthen cooperation across borders and reduce reliance on proprietary ecosystems, particularly across the Global South.
The position taken
Open source has expanded access but has not equalised power. Innovation at the application layer is now widely available. The foundational layer, meaning large-scale research, novel architectures and pre-training, remains concentrated among a few players because of compute intensity, access to large datasets and mature research ecosystems.
The shift comes when organisations move from consuming models to contributing to the foundation: building domain datasets, advancing efficient architectures, strengthening multilingual intelligence, and participating upstream.
The panel was moderated by Lea Gimpel of the Digital Public Goods Alliance, with Amanda Brock of OpenUK, James Lovegrove of Red Hat, Urvashi Aneja of Digital Futures Lab and Chockalingam M. of Nasscom AI.