SAIR’s Open Math Model initiative

Last year I co-founded the Foundation for Science and AI Research (SAIR) with a 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 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…