NSF and NVIDIA award Ai2 a combined $152M to support building a national level fully open AI ecosystem

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 world-class models like OLMo and Molmo are powerful tools to augment the work of experts, but are also fully transparent, reproducible, and most importantly, available to all. Open development of AI is essential to scientific progress, national competitiveness, and global trust in AI-based solutions that will serve humanity. We’re proud to lead that charge with support from NVIDIA and NSF.”

While the AI ecosystem continues to grow, many models aren’t fully open—they rely on closed data and can’t be inspected to ensure that they’re robust for high‑stakes applications. By contrast, our models are released with all of the components needed to analyze, modify, and fine-tune them, or even train them from scratch. 

"Bringing AI into scientific research has been a game changer," said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. "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 U.S. global leadership in science and technology and tackling challenges once thought impossible."

We see this partnership as accelerating a truly open technology ecosystem—led by Ai2—with broad positive impact, powered by American investment and ingenuity. With this support, we’ll produce leading open multimodal models, resources, and tools that help ensure America’s leadership in AI, building on the strong foundation we set with OLMo and Molmo.

Read the full press release.

About Ai2:

Ai2 is a Seattle-based nonprofit AI research institute and 501(c)(3) organization that seeks to build breakthrough AI to solve the world’s biggest problems. Founded in 2014 by the late Paul G. Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, Ai2 develops foundational AI research and innovative applications that deliver real-world impact to advance critical fields like medicine, scientific research, environmental science, and conservation. For more information, visit allenai.org.

About NSF:

The U.S. National Science Foundation propels the nation forward by advancing fundamental research in all fields of science and engineering. NSF supports research and people by providing facilities, instruments and funding to support their ingenuity and sustain the U.S. as a global leader in research and innovation. With a fiscal year 2024 budget of $9.06 billion, NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and institutions. Each year, NSF receives more than 40,000 competitive proposals and makes about 11,000 new awards. Those awards include support for cooperative research with industry, Arctic and Antarctic research and operations, and U.S. participation in international scientific efforts. Visit https://www.nsf.gov.