Readout: OSTP-NSF-PCAST Event on Opportunities at the AI Research Frontier

Today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) convened an event to recognize two artificial intelligence (AI) research and development milestones in the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to help leverage the benefits of AI to benefit all of America: the first round of the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot awards, and the release of the PCAST report, “Supercharging Research: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Meet Global Challenges.”

Officials from the across the White House, Department of Energy (DOE), National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 26 AI industry contributors, congressional members and staff, and academics representing the first allocation of research resources from the NAIRR attended the event.

Following opening remarks, the group discussed how the NAIRR Pilot, as directed by Executive Order (EO) 14110 and following the recommendations from the Task Force report, enables U.S. AI research capacity through strong government and industry partnerships. The group recognized resource contributions from private industry, encouraged researchers to ask bigger questions, and through the PCAST report, called on both groups to make sure societal challenges are addressed.  

NSF announced the first 35 awards of NAIRR computing time to research participants through the NAIRR Pilot on DOE and NSF advanced computing systems. Ten participating researchers were invited to showcase their work for the NAIRR community. This initial cohort of NAIRR pilot researchers are using cutting edge methods to investigate responsible AI and advanced research domains in the public’s interest across sectors. 

In a second session, the group discussed the recently released PCAST report, “Supercharging Research: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Meet Global Challenges,” which highlights the future promise of AI to solve important problems and details AI’s implications for scientific research aimed at tackling major societal and global challenges across a broad range of domains from health challenges to materials science.

The first round of the NAIRR Pilot awards and the launch of the PCAST report highlight the commitment of the administration to AI R&D, showcase U.S. leadership, and set the stage for future advancements.

Participants represented a number of cross sector companies and organizations including: Allen Institute for AI, AMD, Anthropic, AWS, Cerebras, Databricks, Datavant, EleutherAI, Google, Groq, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hugging Face, IBM, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, ML Commons, NVIDIA, Omidyar Networks, OpenAI, OpenMined, Palantir, Regenstrief Institute, SambaNova, Vocareum, Weights and Biases.

Researchers represented institutions including: Carnegie Mellon University, Drexel University, Iowa State University, Stanford University, Stony Brook University, University of Maryland, University of Utah, University of Washington, and Virginia Tech.

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