While investment in AI compliance and strategy continues to grow, numerous layoffs of open source talent are happening within organizations. This talk aims to explore the critical role of open source talent in providing stewardship and building bridges between an organization's AI strategy and its critical infrastructure. The talk will also highlight the risks to the software (and AI) supply chain arising from inadequate support for open source communities, potentially creating vulnerabilities in the entire cycle. Open source is integral to software development, and AI models are no exception. The open source community, leveraging its collaborative model, has significantly contributed to the AI ecosystem. This includes the development of frameworks used to build models, standards, or the sharing of datasets that train these models. Such contributions have enabled the creation of both open source and proprietary AI models, as evidenced by organizations like OpenAI, Hugging Face, and NVIDIA.

While investment in AI compliance and strategy continues to grow, numerous layoffs of open source talent are happening within organizations. This talk aims to explore the critical role of open source talent in providing stewardship and building bridges between an organization's AI strategy and its critical (open source projects) infrastructure. The talk will also highlight the risks to the software (and AI) supply chain arising from inadequate support for open source communities, potentially creating vulnerabilities in the entire ecosystem.