Artificial intelligence appears poised to transform the economy across sectors ranging from healthcare and finance, to retail and education. What some have coined the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is driven by three key trends: greater availability of data, increases in computing power, and improvements to algorithm design.
Historically, partnerships between government(s), universities, and industries have anchored the U.S. innovation ecosystem. Yet this innovation ecosystem faces serious potential challenges. Computing power has become critical for the advancement of AI, but the high cost of compute has placed cutting edge AI research in a position accessible only to key industry players and a handful of elite universities. Access to data—the raw ingredients used to train most AI models—is increasingly limited to the private sector and large platforms, since government data sources remain largely inaccessible to the AI research community. As the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI) has determined, “[t]he consolidation of the AI industry threatens U.S. technological competitiveness.”
In late 2019, Stanford HAI co-directors Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy were one of the first to issue a call for the U.S. government to create a National Research Cloud (NRC). They envisioned the NRC would be a close partnership between academia, government, industry, and civil society to provide researchers equitable access to high-end computational resources, large-scale government datasets in a secure cloud environment, and necessary expertise to benefit from a NRC. Stanford HAI led efforts with 22 top computer science universities and a bipartisan, bicameral group of lawmakers proposing legislation to bring the NRC to fruition. On January 1, 2021, the U.S. Congress authorized the National AI Research Resource Task Force Act as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021.
Stanford Law School and Stanford HAI partnered to host a policy practicum on “Creating a National Research Cloud.” The practicum drew students, researchers, and faculty across engineering, computer science, law, economic, and policy backgrounds to conduct an exhaustive study on precisely how the United States can create, implement, and maintain a NRC. After a nearly 10-month investigation, Stanford HAI and the Stanford Law School are proud to present its newest white paper Building a National AI Research Resource: A Blueprint for the National Research Cloud