Amid Trump administration cuts to federal science funding, one government program is still pushing forward with a mission to democratize AI research.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) plans to spend $35 million annually for up to five years to establish an operations center for the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), in a move that could further cement what’s currently a pilot program. The NSF created NAIRR early last year in a bid to give researchers more access to computing resources through partnerships with top tech companies.
Why it matters: For decades, many of the biggest breakthroughs in AI came from academia. But in the ChatGPT era, the cost and resource demands of creating a massive cutting-edge model have ballooned, and the scales have tipped decisively toward big, closed-off companies that can better afford such undertakings.
“Today, no university in the world can build a frontier AI system on par with industry,” the authors of a Stanford University policy brief wrote late last year.
That disparity might limit AI developed in the public interest and close doors to research questions that can’t be readily commercialized, the authors said. Academics like “AI godmother” and Stanford computer science professor Fei-Fei Li have been pushing for a national research cloud of this sort for more than half a decade now.
Where it stands: In late March, Rep. Jay Obernolte, a California Republican, and Rep. Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat, reintroduced a bill called the CREATE AI Act that would formally establish the NAIRR, but it hasn’t passed despite bipartisan support. President Trump also supported the NAIRR as part of his AI Action Plan.
Since the NAIRR pilot began, the NSF said it has supplied more than 400 research teams with resources like “computing platforms, datasets, software, and models,” according to the announcement. The Operations Center is intended to help grow the NAIRR through a new “operations strategy and management structure” and a centralized web portal to make it easier to access.
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“The NAIRR Operating Center solicitation marks a key step in the transition from the NAIRR Pilot to building a sustainable and scalable NAIRR program,” Katie Antypas, director of the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, said in a statement. “We look forward to continued collaboration with private sector and agency partners, whose contributions have been critical.”
Independence ensured: Brandi Geurkink, executive director of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, said government-sponsored computing resources like NAIRR and similar state-level programs can be helpful for researchers as long as measures are put in place to ensure the independence of the work. The CITR recently released a report on the state of independent tech research, in which 85% of respondents said lack of funding was a top barrier.
“When I first saw these pilots, the question that came to my mind was really about how independence is still ensured, because we talk a lot in the report and in the coalition writ large about independence from corporate interests, but independence from governmental interests is another really big part of researcher independence,” Geurkink said. “And so when pilots, for example, are funded by the federal government, funded by state governments, then it still raises that question around independence. Which isn’t to say that no funding should ever come from state or federal governments, but there need to be safeguards in place to ensure that that independence can be preserved.”