SAIR Announces Open Model Initiative for the Mathematical Community

Summary

Last year I co-founded the Foundation for Science and AI Research (SAIR) with some private donors to create a non-profit organization that could support responsible uses of AI in mathematics and the other sciences, independent of the major AI companies. Initially, our resources were rather limited, and our main activities consisted primarily of podcasts , short events , and competitions . However, we have been slowly trying to expand in scale, ambition, and logistical capacity; for instance, we were very grateful to receive recent support from XTX markets and Susquehanna to fund our next round of SAIR competitions. Furthermore, we have been negotiating with several key partners from academia and industry towards an initiative to build open weight models for science, as well as open source tooling for using both open and closed source LLMs for scientific applications. We had initially planned a gradual rollout of this initiative, starting with a few pilot projects over the next few months, but given current events and the high demand for open models, we are accelerating our schedule and moving our initial announcement of the initiative to today , despite the fact that some key planning is still underway. In particular we are now ready to collect expressions of interest in the initiative, as we are seeking partners who can contribute funding, compute, expertise, or community building to our efforts. (Expressions of interest can be registered at the bottom of the announcement page .) I have replicated the text of our initial announcement below: we plan to provide more updates and information on the initiative shortly, including an announcement of our partners, as well as future plans to integrate this initiative into our existing portfolio of podcasts, events, and competitions. Building Open Models for the Mathematical Community An Invitation from SAIR Foundation Mathematics advances through discoveries that others can examine and build upon. Generations of researchers have created a shared body of knowledge, sustained by open exchange and respect for each other’s contributions. As AI becomes part of mathematical research, these principles should shape the tools we use. SAIR and its partners are commencing an initiative to be at the forefront of shaping and implementing these new tools. Let’s work together to build Math 2.0. Models Shaped by the Community Thro…