Powering the Future of Generative AI
With a core focus on biosciences, health care, computer vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP), the new center will be housed within UT’s interdisciplinary Machine Learning Laboratory (MLL) and co-led by faculty from the Cockrell School of Engineering and the College of Natural Sciences. In recognition of AI’s growth across industries, it also includes faculty members and support from Dell Medical School, as well as researchers from the School of Information and McCombs School of Business.
“UT has established a tremendous foundation in AI,” says MLL Director Adam Klivans. “The new Center for GenAI will help us accelerate the process of scientific discovery and find new solutions to major engineering challenges that would otherwise take years of experimental work.”
The growth of ChatGPT and similar generative AI technologies has put pressure on many industry groups, healthcare organizations and public agencies to work with academic institutions to harness AI for innovation. The Texas Center for Generative AI will be powered by a new GPU cluster, which will be the largest of its kind in academia.
The cluster will comprise 600 NVIDIA H100s GPUs – short for graphics processing units, specialized devices to enable rapid mathematical computations, making them ideal for training AI models. TACC, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, will host and support the cluster.
Letter from the Director
It is an incredible time to be an AI researcher. Problems that we could only dream about solving a few years back are getting cracked as AI models fold proteins, accelerate medical imaging, help us write code, or solve Math Olympiad problems.
Universities have long played a key role in educating AI researchers, inventing the algorithms used in modern AI models and supporting the peer-review ecosystem that disseminates and evaluates this research. However, as compute and data are becoming bottleneck resources, it is not clear how universities can remain on the forefront of the generative AI revolution.
At UT Austin, we are leading the way with creating open models, the largest public datasets, and a massive GPU cluster to drive innovation in our four focus areas: biosciences, health care, computer vision and NLP.
We are grateful to the UT Austin Cockrell School of Engineering and the College of Natural Sciences for supporting the new Texas Center for Generative AI, and to Dell Medical School, the School of Information and McCombs School of Business for supporting our research.
We are excited to invite researchers from Academia and Industry to work with us to uncover what possibilities the future holds.
– Alex Dimakis
Team
Director: Alex Dimakis
Scientific Board: Alex Dimakis, Adam Klivans, Sujay Sanghavi
Area Leaders
NLP: Greg Durrett, Sujay Sanghavi, Eunsol Choi
Biosciences: Adam Klivans, Claus Wilke
Health: Jon Tamir, Ying Ding
Vision: Atlas Wang, Kristen Grauman
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