Keynote: Open Source for AI and AI for Open Source - Priya Nagpurkar

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Keynote: Open Source for AI and AI for Open Source - Priya Nagpurkar, Vice President, Hybrid Cloud and AI Platforms, IBM Research

Open source has been the single most powerful force democratizing AI—taking capabilities that might otherwise be confined to a handful of well-resourced labs and putting them within reach of researchers, developers, and IT operators everywhere. But the relationship runs both ways: as AI systems increasingly write and contribute code, they are reshaping the open-source ecosystem itself—straining how we manage a rising tide of machine-generated contributions and how we secure code in an era when both attackers and defenders are AI-augmented. In this keynote, I make the case for why open models and open technologies like PyTorch, vLLM, and llm-d are critical enablers for enterprises and governments seeking greater control and flexibility over their AI, and I highlight the technical innovation making this possible. I close by arguing that we have a real opportunity to turn this two-way street into a virtuous loop—building AI that accelerates and secures open source even as open source accelerates AI.