Mission

Our mission is to accelerate artificial intelligence innovation and increase its positive impact on society. In collaboration with our 125+ founding Members and Affiliates, including startups, leading companies, academics, and non-profits from around the globe, we democratize machine learning through open industry-standard benchmarks that measure quality and performance and build open, large-scale, and diverse datasets to improve AI models. 

Every major technological advance follows a similar trajectory towards universal adoption and impact. The arc from research to broad accessibility generally takes from 30-40 years: from early automobiles to the family car, from development of ARPANET to the mainstream World Wide Web, from the first cellular phones to an smartphone in every pocket. Each of these examples started with technological breakthroughs, but for decades was limited by expertise, access, and expense. 

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are no different. ML and AI have been being developed for decades, but even with today’s rapid advances, the technology continues to be fragmented, bespoke, and poorly understood. We believe that we can unlock the next stage of AI adoption by creating useful measures of quality and performance, by delivering large scale open data sets, and by advancing the state of the art through collaborative, open research that will lead to the next great ideas. These focus areas are aimed to help democratize AI and enable its widespread incorporation into new products and services in fields such as health, safety, and communication that deliver AI benefits to everyone.