The Power of Open Data on GitHub: Fueling AI's Future

A Deep Dive into the Expanding Open Data Landscape on GitHub

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the world, driving digital innovation, promoting experimentation, boosting efficiency, and accelerating progress across numerous industries. Open data is a critical component of this revolution, providing access to vast amounts of data necessary for building reliable AI models. 

At Microsoft, we are committed to democratizing access to open data and fostering the development of artificial intelligence in an inclusive manner. In pursuit of this goal, we recently partnered with GitHub to examine the open data landscape on their platform. The findings of this study were astounding, revealing that GitHub is among the largest hosts of open data globally, with more than 11 million repositories containing more than 142 terabytes of publicly available data. With a user base exceeding 100 million, GitHub has experienced a surge in open data over the past few years, with 81% of the data published in the last four years and 57% in the last two years. 

GitHub is home to a diverse array of data assets that can be utilized for various purposes, including geospatial data, acoustic data, chemistry data, bioinformatics data, medical imaging data, genomics data, and more. 

The availability of open data on GitHub holds immense potential to advance AI research by granting researchers and practitioners access to an expanding volume of data across different domains. The platform itself can be utilized to encourage collaboration and stimulate the development of more advanced AI models. Access to extensive datasets is crucial for scaling AI models, and by hosting open data on GitHub, researchers can easily access and utilize these datasets, ultimately contributing to advancements in the field. 

The impact of making data publicly accessible cannot be overstated. By democratizing access to open data, we can level the playing field and foster more diverse perspectives in AI research. This, in turn, will result in more innovative and inclusive AI solutions that benefit everyone. We believe that this is an essential step toward building a more equitable and just world, especially as AI becomes increasingly integrated into our daily lives. 

We invite you to delve into our study at https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06191 to learn more. 

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