Last Friday, the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory hosted a unique virtual gathering dubbed the "1,000 Scientists AI Jam Session." The event witnessed top scientists from across nine national labs, including ORNL, Argonne, Berkeley, Livermore, Los Alamos, Idaho, and Pacific Northwest, come together to rigorously test artificial intelligence models offered by OpenAI and Anthropic on various scientific problems, as reported by an Oak Ridge National Laboratory's news release.
"AI is accelerating and redefining science," Prasanna Balaprakash, director of AI programs at ORNL, highlighted the transformative power of AI, per ORNL. He added, "AI enables us to ask deeper questions and push the boundaries of what is possible across disciplines." During the jam session, each researcher brought specific challenges from their fields to evaluate the state-of-the-art AI's ability to tackle and potentially solve them.
The session was graced by Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, along with industry leaders like OpenAI president Greg Brockman. Wright, in his address to the participants, made a historical connection, likening the push for AI advancement to the Manhattan Project—a move that eventually led to the formation of Oak Ridge National Laboratory during World War II. Secretary Wright told the ensemble, "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," as stated in the ORNL news release.
