One year after its proposal, the national ai research resource is Coming online soon, at least in pilot form. – as a coalition of US agencies and private partners begins to commit billions in federal funds to publicly accessible tools for aspiring ai scientists and engineers.
NAIRR is the Biden administration's response to the sudden rise of ai on the global tech scene and the concentration of its resources and expertise among a relatively small group of tech giants and privately funded startups. In an attempt to democratize technology a bit and keep the United States competitive against its rivals abroad, the feds decided to dedicate some money to making a variety of resources available to any qualified researcher.
The National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, NASA, NOAA, DARPA and others are partners in the effort, providing resources (such as datasets and queries) and working with applicants in their areas of expertise. And more than two dozen major tech companies are also contributing in some way. All of this has an annual budget of $800 million for the next three years, subject to congressional approval, of course.
In a variety of statements, executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft commit a variety of resources, expertise, free access, etc., to the NAIRR effort.
The resources that will be available are not listed anywhere. Instead, the organization will generally accept requests and proposals, which will be evaluated and resources allocated. Think of it more like a grant-making process than a free supercomputer.
As NSF's Katie Antypas put it, NAIRR “will provide the research community with access to the computing, data, models, software, and training resources needed to advance the ai ecosystem. The NAIRR pilot is really necessary because the resources needed to even start participating in the ecosystem have become increasingly concentrated and inaccessible to many, many communities that are really essential to developing a healthy and responsible ai ecosystem. Therefore, the pilot is the first step to close this gap.”
He gave three examples: a researcher analyzing large ai models and needs large-scale computing resources and has no way to access them; a teacher who wants to allow children to do ai-related tasks (such as training custom models) but needs resources such as virtual notebooks and computing time; and someone looking to predict climate and weather events, who can access NASA and NOAA data sets and combine them with hosted models.
During the two-year pilot period, there will be four areas of focus:
- NAIRR Open, the most general category, implying “access to various ai resources,” presumably for research and projects that do not fit into the narrow categories below.
- NAIRR Secure, focused on ai applications that need privacy and security, such as medical and critical infrastructure. This part is led by the NIH and Energy, as you would expect.
- NAIRR Software focuses more on tools, platforms, services and interoperability.
- NAIRR Classroom is about outreach, education and training.
It may surprise some that there is no apparently military research category (given the presence of DARPA and DOD in partner agencies), but remember that this is a civilian research effort led by executive agencies. Any military investigation will presumably be isolated and military agencies will be there to coordinate and delegate, or offer whatever resources are appropriate in this case.
The idea is that if someone has a valuable idea about how to apply or advance ai in any sector, there should be an expert in the field and a check waiting. But it won't be like a public library, where you walk into your local ai center and someone sets you up with an H100 for half an hour. (That said, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of library-focused outreach program.)
You'll be able to peruse the list of resources on NAIRR's pilot page starting today, and while there are no hard numbers yet, project leaders said only 25 to 50 proposals will likely be accepted in this initial pilot period. with hundreds more locations set to open in the spring as more systems come online.
