Tech Heavyweights Launch AI Global Marketplace

A group of data, technology, digital services and other organizations on Tuesday launched the AI Global Marketplace.

The marketplace is, in essence, an artificial intelligence app store. It will host more than 2,000 high-value AI assets focused on customer engagement and process intelligence problems for the banking, insurance, healthcare and digital commerce markets.

The launch group includes CognitiveScale, HyperGiant, the IEEE, USAA, the Saxena Foundation, the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Software assets in the AI Global Marketplace will be based on the beta version of an open interface: the Cognitive Agent Modeling and Execution Language, or CAMEL.

Users can connect, as well as upload and enrich their own AI data, models and skills in the AI marketplace. They’ll get paid if another person or company uses their app.

Future plans for the AI Global Marketplace include blockchain-based mechanisms for secure data ownership assurance, and a new digital token-based micropayment marketplace that will help transfer, buy and sell fine-grained data, models, skills and agents to enable a B2B AI economy.

The chances of success for the marketplace are “very good,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

“The customer backing alone gives it legs,” he told the E-Commerce Times.

The CAMEL Spec

CAMEL is a standard, platform- and language-agnostic specification — the Open Cognitive Skills (OCS) spec — that describes the composition and orchestration of skills, data, and machine learning models to define and execute a cognitive agent used to augment human intelligence.

It leverages standards such as the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) for representing deep learning models that can be transferred between networks. Facebook and Microsoft jointly launched ONNX last year.

CAMEL aims to align with IEEE 7000 standards for addressing ethical concerns during system design.

CAMEL has been released as a family of open specs.

Marketplace Goals

“I’m seeing two valid objectives in the AI Global Marketplace announcement,” said Doug Henschen, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

One is “the need to ensure responsible and transparent AI decision-making,” he told the E-Commerce Times, and the other is “the need to create reusable building blocks of code, models and data to speed and ease the development of scalable machine learning and deep learning development.”

Both are “laudable objectives, but I think the second marketplace role is unique, and somewhere the AI Global Marketplace could create a lot of value,” Henschen pointed out.

Long-Term Vision

The marketplace currently appears to be in the conceptual stages of development — there is no indication that any of the envisioned high-value AI assets are yet available.

IEEE 7000 is an ongoing project and specs are under development.

CAMEL’s alignment with IEEE 7000 “is likely more a statement of direction than a statement of fact,” Enderle pointed out, “but they plan to be aligned and will likely relegate this aspect to the IEEE rather than develop it internally.”

CAMEL “looks like an impressive platform backed by a serious number of multi-industry heavyweights,” he noted.

“What helps a lot here is this effort’s backed by companies that will use the result, not just companies that are building technology,” Enderle said. “Customer-driven efforts like this tend to attract vendors like honey does bears.”