The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee voted today to approve the Creating Resources for Every American To Experiment with AI Act of 2023 (CREATE AI Act).
The bill would make permanent the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot, which the agency officially launched on Jan. 24.
The legislation was approved by the committee on a vote of 19-7, and the approval sends the bill to the full Senate for consideration.
Under the legislation, NSF would oversee the NAIRR through a program management office. However, an independent non-governmental entity would oversee the day-to-day operations of the NAIRR, including the procurement of computational and data resources needed to do AI research.
The aim of NSF’s NAIRR pilot is to create shared national infrastructure to support the AI research community and power responsible AI use. Those resources include access to advanced computing, datasets, models, software, training, and user support.
The January launch of the NSF pilot met one of the goals for the agency in President Biden’s AI executive order issued last October.
In addition to NSF, government partners for the NAIRR include the Department of Energy (DoE), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), NASA, National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Department of Agriculture (USDA), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), U.S. Patent and Trade Office (USPTO), and the Department of Defense (DoD).
Some of the other non-governmental NAIRR partners include the Allen Institute for AI, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Anthropic, Cerebras, Databricks, EleutherAI, Google, Hugging Face, IBM, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Omidyar Network, OpenAI, OpenMined, Palantir, SambaNova Systems, Vocareum, and Weights and Biases.
