4 days ago
Nvidia, National Science Foundation Partner to Create Open AI Models for US Scientists
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has secured significant investments from the private and public sectors for its Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure (OMAI) project. The Allen Institute for AI, known as Ai2, is leading the project, which will provide cutting-edge AI models for scientists nationwide. Nvidia has already committed $77 million to the new project.
The key to the OMAI project is that the large language models (LLMs) produced will be open source, freeing researchers from potential ties to private interests. At this stage of AI development, the hardware costs of training LLMs are outside the budgets of many research facilities. Those LLMs are generally not open source. (Even OpenAI isn't entirely open source, despite its name.) Ai2 plans to fill that gap with the OMAI project by producing LLMs geared towards literature and scientific data.
'These tools will enable America's researchers and developers to process and analyze research faster, generate code and visualizations, and connect new insights to past discoveries, accelerating breakthroughs across materials science, biology, energy, and more,' the NSF wrote in a statement.
Ai2 was founded by the late Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder who donated considerable sums to further science research. The investment in Ai2's OMAI project gives Ai2 a massive boost in funding and hardware.
Credit: Nvidia.
Nvidia isn't the only organization contributing to the OMAI project. The NSF is providing $75 million, bringing the initial investment to $152 million. The Trump administration recently created an AI Action Plan, which prioritizes the US's 'global dominance in artificial intelligence.'
'Bringing AI into scientific research has been a game changer,' said Brian Stone of the NSF. 'NSF is proud to partner with Nvidia to equip America's scientists with the tools to accelerate breakthroughs. These investments are not just about enabling innovation; they are about securing US global leadership in science and technology and tackling challenges once thought impossible.'
The $152 million will also help the OMAI project support universities in Hawai'i, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Washington. The project already has partnerships with Cirrascale Cloud Services and SuperMicro. Cirrascale will handle hardware infrastructure management.
As you'd expect from a hardware company, Nvidia is providing its HGX B300 systems, which are loaded with Nvidia Blackwell chips and designed for AI uses. According to Nvidia, the HGX B300 features 8 Blackwell Ultra SXM GPUs and up to 2.3TB of memory. The OMAI project hasn't indicated yet how many HGX B300 systems will be involved.
