Our Mission

Powerful large-scale Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems such as Large Language Models (LLMs) herald a new era of AI that is poised to reshape society, but scientists cannot explain their predictions. The National Deep Inference Fabric (NDIF) is a research computing project that will enable researchers and students to crack open the mysteries inside these enormous neural networks.

Because large-scale AI systems are trained automatically using massive amounts of data—instead of being designed line-by-line by a programmer—the internal workings of the current generation of AI are inscrutable to humans. Understanding how these systems work is an emerging science. But performing science on the internals of such large-scale AI systems requires substantial computational resources that are not practical at institutional scale, because the infrastructure required to study the detailed computations of AI differs from the computing systems used for ordinary commercial deployment of AI.

NDIF addresses this critical need by creating a unique nationwide research computing fabric that enables scientists to perform transparent and reproducible experiments on the largest-scale open AI systems. NDIF will advance our nation’s understanding of the capabilities of large-scale AI systems, as well as their limitations, robustness, safety issues, and impacts on human society.