There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) is moving faster than anyone could have imagined — yet it is still nascent, and many conversations are more about hype and sales rather than incorporating the technology in meaningful, real-world scenarios.

This has left many developers scrambling to not just understand AI but adopt it in ways that can benefit both them and their organizations.

To help close this gap — and give developers a louder voice in the conversation — AI developer platform Clarifai is today launching the AI Developer Alliance.

According to Chris Kent, Clarifai’s SVP of marketing, the goal is to “really focus on the idea of advocacy and knowledge sharing as well as bringing together expertise within the industry around best practices, do’s and don'ts, focusing on the betterment of building AI.”

To start, the new alliance will foster knowledge sharing around case studies, research, best practices and critical resources, Kent explained.

The goal is to be “content-rich for people trying to do the building,” he said. Developers will be “getting it from the people building the products rather than just the commercial side of it.”

As part of this, the alliance will support numerous virtual and in-person events such as workshops, summits and online forums.

Developers will have exposure to new technologies, “and honestly people and experts in the space they wouldn’t have access to otherwise,” said Kent.

Beyond knowledge sharing and collaboration, the hope is that the alliance will eventually foster joint go-to-market ventures, he said, with organizations, developers and researchers joining forces on cutting-edge projects and research.

“It really aligns to ‘How can we build things better, how can we build them faster, how can we be more efficient? We can share the burden collectively, share our learnings,” said Kent.

The alliance is open to all companies that play a “pivotal role in shaping the future of AI technology,” according to Clarifai. Initial members include Baseten, Brev.dev, Cast.ai, Cleanlab, Coder, DBT Labs, Deepgram, Ikigai, Jasper.ai, LangChain, Last9, LlamaIndex, New York University, Postman, Sieve Data, Tabnine and Weaviate.

“This collaborative initiative focused squarely at the developer level signifies a pivotal step towards fostering and speeding innovation within the AI community,” said Matt Arcaro, research director for computer vision AI tools and technologies at IDC. “By bringing together leading developers and organizations, this alliance is paving the way for impactful advancements in AI technology, transparency and ethics.”

AI’s emergence is similar to the advent of the cloud, Kent noted, with an “explosion on the technical scene” and a mad dash to get into the space.

“Ultimately it’s market-led,” he said — and developers are often secondary to the conversation.

While companies and technologies are emerging to address challenges and opportunities across verticals in both closed and open source fashion, those aren’t as visible amidst all the hype; they are drowned out by “heavy voices” such as market leader OpenAI, said Kent.

“There’s a lot of really interesting and compelling technology, solutions and content in the AI world,” said Kent. “Part of the challenge is how do we elevate that content in a way that’s beneficial for the developer space.”

When developers are directly connected to AI technologists and experts, he pointed out, they can start to address challenges below the stack, in the stack and on top of the stack as they build and fine-tune AI. They can incorporate best practices around data and ensure it isn’t exposed to cybersecurity threats.

“They can pressure test it, build in a way that’s scalable,” said Kent. This can help them operationalize AI, bring it into everyday operations and incorporate it into their unique skill sets.

Developers struggle with speed and efficiency, and anything that can improve that is going to be “a boon” for them and the businesses they work for, said Kent.

He pointed out that half the challenge of working with new technologies is understanding the right way to go about it. “If you know you know, but for people getting into it and building these things, there are a lot of unanswered questions and not a ton of collective voice to fall back on.”

For developers AI offers huge opportunities around automation, Kent pointed out.

“There’s a lot of stuff that’s super manual right now, whether by design or out of necessity,” he said. “How do we make this easier, better, faster, cheaper? How do we automate really complex tasks?”

As with other roles, developers can benefit from AI personal assistants, and from a machine learning standpoint, there are “tons of opportunities” around insights.

“It’s taking these huge chunks of data, being able to glean info, learn things maybe weren’t able to learn from before,” said Kent.

For instance, in cybersecurity, automation can help with anomaly detection and pattern matching. There are “millions and millions of terabytes of audit logs,” but it is unfeasible for developers to sift through all that, he noted.

“The number one commodity [for developers] is their time,” said Kent. “AI is something that will help a lot of them preserve that time that they can’t get back.”

Going forward, AI might eventually be able to write code and perform code reviews — however, Kent noted, we’re not at a “ubiquitous stage” for that yet.

“We’re at the point where AI can create it, not at the point where AI can make sure it’s right” without human intervention around business logic and compliance, he said.

As the technology continues to advance, many more use cases will emerge — and the alliance aims to foster as much collaboration as possible, Kent said.

“Long-term, we want to create an environment or platform for people to communicate, not just have it be vendor or tech-oriented,” he said. “We’re really excited to see where it goes from a community standpoint, the community is really incredible, we may see it growing in ways we really didn’t envision.”