The LF AI Foundation and ODPi merged to support a growing portfolio of technologies and to drive open source collaboration across AI and data. The LF AI Foundation supports open-source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning while ODPi focuses on big data solutions. 

Together, the organizations will make up the LF AI Data Foundation, and will enable additional collaboration and integration of AI/ML/DL and data.

The effort will build and support an open community and a growing ecosystem of open source AI, data and analytics projects. It will also bring developers and projects together, orchestrated by a single Technical Advisory Council and several committees (Trusted AI, BI & AI) to provide a unified glance for end users on tools, interoperability, integration, standards, and the future of AI.

“LF AI has been growing at the rate of one new project per month, including several data projects. It is a natural move to bring together the open AI and data communities to enable better interoperability and capabilities across all of our hosted projects and to enable closer collaboration, which has been a proven recipe for building a strong open ecosystem. It will also provide our members greater cost efficiency when supporting our projects,” said Ibrahim Haddad, the executive director of LF AI. “We look forward to supporting innovation in the open source ecosystem focused on AI, Data and Analytics.”

ODPi and its projects Egeria and OpenDS4All will become hosted projects under the LF AI & Data Foundation, with BI and AI becoming a committee within the foundation.

They will still maintain their current open technical governance model and establish collaboration with other hosted projects in LF AI & Data through the efforts of the Technical Advisory Council. 

“Over the past 5 years, ODPi has been a part of driving standardization and consolidation in the Big Data and Hadoop ecosystem, as well as becoming a focal point for the data challenges of the enterprises of today such as metadata, governance, and data science,” said John Mertic, the director of ODPi. “Coming together to form LF AI & Data is the next natural step in this mission, enabling greater interoperability to drive both innovation and sustainable growth for key projects.”