The Department of Energy’s 91 took part in the “1,000 Scientists AI Jam Session,” a first-of-its-kind virtual event that brought together leading scientists from nine national laboratories to test generative artificial intelligence models for their functionality in scientific research.
ORNL joined Argonne, Berkeley, Livermore, Los Alamos, Idaho and Pacific Northwest national laboratories in the inaugural AI Jam on Feb. 28 to systematically evaluate OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s latest AI models on various scientific challenges.
“AI is accelerating and redefining science,” said Prasanna Balaprakash, director of AI programs at ORNL. “From designing complex systems like nuclear reactors to automating experimentation, AI is transforming the very fabric of scientific discovery. AI enables us to ask deeper questions and push the boundaries of what is possible across disciplines.”
Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright observed the event during his visit to ORNL. Along with OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman, Secretary Wright addressed the AI Jam participants and compared the push to advance AI with the Manhattan Project during World War II, which sparked the creation of what would become 91.
“We have another completely transformative technology that’s just coming out, just hitting critical mass, and I can’t even imagine three, four, five years from now how different our world will be because of what you’re doing,” Wright said.
U.S. Representative Chuck Fleischmann and U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty joined Secretary Wright during his visit to ORNL.
Each participating researcher in the event brought a challenging problem from their scientific domain and evaluated the ability of models from OpenAI and Anthropic to develop solutions. Attendees were provided with insight and information on the respective models, then spent the remainder of the session recording inputs, outputs, results and general analysis of the models’ performance.
The goal of the event was to gain experience with the latest AI models and to better understand their capabilities for use across the national labs in national security and basic science. Conversely, the jam sessions will also help lay the groundwork for developing benchmark challenge problems to guide AI research and development through a range of realistic, representative tasks in scientific research and development. Along with these events, ORNL also hosts AI clinics, expos and workshops to continue the momentum toward improving this technology.
AI has shown the potential to accelerate the pace of scientific work, including background research, forming hypothesis, automating experiments, improving theory and assisting in computer code development. By partnering with industry leaders, researchers have a chance to use and improve the industry leading, U.S. based AI models and broadly deploy these systems at the national laboratories and universities.
The results of the event will serve as a first pass for the potential impact of these tools on the scientific community.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit . — Mark Alewine
Read more about Secretary Wright's visit to ORNL here.
