Ai2 is a founding partner of National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) to advance industry wide AI research and collaboration

Today the National Science Foundation announced the launch of the NAIRR pilot aiming to power a trusted, more collaborative approach to AI research in the U.S. As a founding partner, Ai2 is excited to drive this program forward alongside companies like Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, HuggingFace, and Databricks to collectively fuel AI experimentation and discovery.

“The advancement of trustworthy AI demands a truly open approach driven by cross-sector collaboration at a scale we’ve never seen before. Today’s NAIRR pilot launch is a massive step forward in achieving just that,” said Ali Farhadi, CEO of Ai2: Allen Institute for AI.

At Ai2, we believe a truly open approach to AI can grow the community of researchers, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and others necessary to drive meaningful AI innovation. AI was once an open field with an active research community, but as models grew and became more expensive, we saw a shift and AI work started happening behind closed doors. The NAIRR pilot represents a critical step back towards what was once an open system, providing equitable tools to the research community and democratizing access to AI innovation.

As part of the NAIRR pilot, Ai2 is making available models, training software, evaluation software, and full training data — including code that produces the training data under the umbrella of the “Dolma” project. By sharing these resources, Ai2 will enable researchers to take a more scientific approach to AI. Until now, closed models have prevented researchers from being able to trace model performance and behavior back to the data they were trained on, so they could not run system experiments and were limited to post-hoc approaches. By openly sharing research, computational datasets and models, scientists can now actively investigate, innovate, and advance AI.

True open access is required to build a scientific approach to AI, which is critical for developing AI that we can understand, explain, and trust. That’s why we introduced Ai2 Dolma, one of the world’s largest open datasets last year, and will soon introduce an open large language model OLMo. We look forward to making our AI research available for the NAIRR pilot to enable open AI research alongside our NAIRR partners.

“We are thrilled that Ai2 has made an initial contribution to the NAIRR Pilot. Ai2’s commitment to open AI research, data, and evaluation is well aligned with one of the NAIRR Pilot’s key goals of democratizing access to AI research resources for the broad research and education community. Critically, Ai2 will provide their considerable technical expertise to aid in the design of the NAIRR Pilot and NAIRR software stack,” said Katie Antypas, Director of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure at NSF.