The national science foundation announced a partnership with nvidia to support the Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI) project, led by the Allen Institute for AI, known as Ai2. The agencies said they will fund the effort, with financial details not disclosed in the announcement, and that nvidia will provide additional resources and technical support. The program is aimed at producing a fully open suite of advanced artificial intelligence models tailored for scientific research.
The project will develop open-source, multimodal large language models trained on scientific data and scholarly literature. Those models are intended to help researchers process and analyze papers and datasets faster, generate code and visualizations, and connect new findings to prior work. Initial application areas named in the announcement include materials discovery, protein function prediction for biomedical research, and efforts to remedy core weaknesses in current large language models. The release emphasized that the tools will be built with open weights and code so that academic teams can inspect, validate and extend them.
NSF said the effort aligns with the White House AI action plan and is funded through its Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure program, which supports community-driven projects that sit between individual grants and large national facilities. The project will also include workforce development components, including training to expand participation beyond traditional technology hubs and strengthen national competitiveness in critical technologies. Officials framed the work as a way to preserve and extend U.S. leadership in open models for research and industry.
Speakers quoted in the announcement highlighted different goals: Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director, emphasized accelerating breakthroughs through new tools; Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of nvidia, described the effort as expanding infrastructure for U.S. scientists; Ali Farhadi, chief executive of Ai2, called fully open models a necessity for collaborative discovery; and Michael Kratsios, director of the White House office of science and technology policy, connected the effort to the AI action plan. Participating research teams will include groups from the University of Washington, the University of Hawaii at Hilo, the University of New Hampshire and the University of New Mexico.
