OpenAI brings its large language models to Energy’s national labs
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As OpenAI expands access to its large language models to all national labs, scientists at nationals labs anticipate workloads that usually take decades to be reduced to “two or three” years.
OpenAI announced on Thursday that it signed an agreement with all 17 of the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories to provide them with access to its reasoning large language models to support breakthrough discoveries for a bevy of applications.
“Sharing our technology with the nation’s top scientists aligns with our mission of building [artificial generative intelligence] to benefit humanity, and we believe the U.S. government is a critical partner to achieve this goal,” the announcement said.
Target focus areas for the scientists looking to leverage OpenAI’s models include accelerating fundamental scientific research, enhancing cybersecurity for the U.S. power grid, disease prevention research, energy research, threat detection, nuclear security and high-energy physics research.
On the hardware side, Microsoft was listed as the “preferred partner” for compute infrastructure that can process the volumes of data OpenAI’s models demand.
This enhanced agreement follows OpenAI’s initial partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. OpenAI’s press release stated that access to its models will be conditioned on a “careful and selective review of use cases and consultations on AI safety” from OpenAI employees with security clearances.
Researchers at national labs have observed –– based on early studies –– that access to advanced AI models will help with “nearly all” of the broad national missions of each lab.
“Our hope is that in the next two or three years we will be able to make contributions to the nation that otherwise would have taken us ten or twenty years,” Jason Pruet, the director of Los Alamos’ National Security AI Office, told Nextgov/FCW.