NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

Summary

Ai2 has been awarded $75 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and $77 million from NVIDIA as part of a jointly funded project with the NSF and NVIDIA to advance our research and develop truly open AI models and solutions that will accelerate scientific discovery. The partnership supports the NSF Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure project, Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI). Led by Principal Investigator Dr. Noah A. Smith, Senior Director of NLP Research at Ai2 and Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, OMAI will build a national level fully open AI ecosystem to drive scientific discovery through AI, while also advancing the science of AI itself.The project will also support the University of Washington (co-PI: Hanna Hajishirzi, PhD), the University of Hawai’i at Hilo (co-PI: Travis Mandel, PhD), the University of New Hampshire (co-PI: Samuel Carton, PhD), and the University of New Mexico (co-PI: Sarah Dreier, PhD).Our cloud computing partner, Cirrascale Cloud Services, will provide managed services for the new hardware infrastructure funded by the support, helping us push the boundaries of AI for science. Supermicro will supply its industry-leading platforms to support the partnership.As a non-profit leader in fully open AI models and solutions that are reproducible and shared along with data, code, evaluations, and documentation, we’re uniquely positioned to advance American AI for the scientific community. OLMo is our family of high‑performance open text models, and Molmo is our series of open, industry‑leading multimodal language models.The support from NSF and NVIDIA will provide critical AI infrastructure that will enable Ai2 to advance the science of AI and AI for science.”This award marks a significant moment for truly open, scientific AI,” said Smith. “At Ai2, with our academic collaborators, we’re building an ecosystem where ...