The University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering has teamed up with the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) on a new project aimed at developing the first fully open set of artificial intelligence tools to accelerate scientific discovery and enhance the United States’ leadership in AI innovation. Today the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and NVIDIA announced a combined investment of $152 million in this effort, including $75 million awarded through the NSF’s Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure program.
Ai2 will lead the Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI) project. The principal investigator is Ai2 Senior Director of NLP Research Noah A. Smith, who is also Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the Allen School. Smith’s faculty colleague Hanna Hajishirzi, Torode Family Professor at the Allen School, is co-principal investigator on behalf of UW and also Ai2’s senior director of AI.
“OMAI is a terrific opportunity to leverage the longstanding partnership between Ai2 and the Allen School, which has yielded some of the most exciting developments in building truly open AI models and trained some of the most promising young scientists working in AI today,” said Hajishirzi. “This is a pivotal moment for us to form the foundation for scientific discovery and innovation across a variety of domains — and also, importantly, advance the science of AI itself.”
The cost of building and maintaining today’s AI models is too prohibitive for all but the most well-resourced companies, leaving researchers in academic and not-for-profit labs without ready access to these powerful tools and stifling scientific progress. The goal of the OMAI project is to build out this foundational infrastructure through the creation and evaluation of models trained on open-access scientific literature and informed by the needs of scientists across a range of disciplines. By openly releasing the model weights, training data, code and documentation, the team will provide researchers using its tools with an unprecedented level of transparency, reproducibility and accountability, instilling confidence in both the underlying models and their results.
The concept for OMAI was incubated in an ecosystem of open research and collaboration that the Allen School and Ai2 have built since the latter’s founding in 2014. That ecosystem has enabled dozens of UW students to collaborate with Ai2 on research projects, produced leading-edge open AI artifacts like the Open Language Model (OLMo) and Tulu, and developed tools like OLMoTrace to give anyone full visibility into models’ training data — all of which have helped fuel Seattle’s emergence as a hub of AI innovation.
Smith looks forward to leveraging that longstanding synergy to push technologies that will have a transformational impact on the American scientific enterprise — and even transform the conversation around AI itself.
“There’s been a reaction that seems to be widespread that AI is a thing that is happening to us, as if we are passively subject to this technology and don’t have agency,” Smith said. “But we do have agency. We get to define what the priorities should be for AI and to build tools that scientists will actually be able to use and trust. With OMAI, the UW will be a leader in this new paradigm and push AI in a more responsible direction that will benefit society in a multitude of ways.”
In addition to the UW, academic partners in the OMAI project include the University of Hawai’i at Hilo, the University of New Hampshire and the University of New Mexico.
OMAI represents a landmark NSF investment in the technology infrastructure needed to power AI-driven science — a development that Brian Stone, performing the duties of the agency’s director, described as a “game changer.”
“These investments are not just about enabling innovation; they are about securing U.S. global leadership in science and technology and tackling challenges once thought impossible,” Stone said.
To learn more, read the award announcement, the Ai2 blog post and related coverage GeekWire and SiliconANGLE.
