America's Apollo Program for AI: Securing our Nation's Future

Tuesday - May 14 2024, 08:17 UTC - 8 months ago

A national compute strategy is necessary for America to stay ahead of the global race for computational power in the age of AI. Countries worldwide are investing in their own AI strategies, and the US must do the same to secure its future. This includes building dedicated government AI supercomputers and leveraging AI for various national interests.

The global race for computational power is well underway, fueled by a worldwide boom in artificial intelligence. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is seeking to raise as much as $7 trillion for a chipmaking venture. Tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon are building AI chips of their own. The need for more computing horsepower to train and use AI models—fueling a quest for everything from cutting-edge chips to giant data sets—isn't just a current source of geopolitical leverage (as with US curbs on chip exports to China) .

It is also shaping the way nations will grow and compete in the future, with governments from India to the UK developing national strategies and stockpiling Nvidia graphics processing units.I believe it’s high time for America to have its own national compute strategy: an Apollo program for the age of AI.In January, under President Biden’s executive order on AI, the National Science Foundation launched a pilot program for the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), envisioned as a "shared research infrastructure" to provide AI computing power, access to open government and nongovernment data sets, and training resources to students and AI researchers .

The NAIRR pilot, while incredibly important, is just an initial step. The NAIRR Task Force’s final report, published last year, outlined an eventual $2.6 billion budget required to operate the NAIRR over six years. That’s far from enough—and even then, it remains to be seen if Congress will authorize the NAIRR beyond the pilot.Meanwhile, much more needs to be done to expand the government’s access to computing power and to deploy AI in the nation’s service .

Advanced computing is now core to the security and prosperity of our nation; we need it to optimize national intelligence, pursue scientific breakthroughs like fusion reactions, accelerate advanced materials discovery, ensure the cybersecurity of our financial markets and critical infrastructure, and more. The federal government played a pivotal role in enabling the last century’s major technological breakthroughs by providing the core research infrastructure, like particle accelerators for high-energy physics in the 1960s and supercomputing centers in the 1980s .

Now, with other nations around the world devoting sustained, ambitious government investment to high-performance AI computing, we can’t risk falling behind. It’s a race to power the most world-altering technology in human history.First, more dedicated government AI supercomputers need to be built for an array of missions ranging from classified intelligence processing to advanced biological computing .

In the modern era, computing capabilities and technical progress have proceeded in lockstep.Over the past decade, the US has successfully pushed classic scientific computing into the exascale era with the Frontier, Aurora, and soon-to-arrive El Capitan machines—massive computers that can perform over a quintillion (a billion billion) operations per second. Over the next decade, the power of AI models is projected to increase by a factor of 1,000 to 10,000, and leading compute architectures may be capable of training a 500-trillion-parameter AI model in a day or less .

With such computing power, nations can leverage AI to further national interests, from optimizing national intelligence to accelerating scientific discovery and improving cybersecurity. It's time for America to step up and invest in its own national compute strategy to secure our nation's future in the age of AI.