National Deep Inference Fabric (NDIF) Project is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). A collaborative research platform to investigate the internal computations of large language models (LLMs) and their societal impacts.

NSF National Deep Inference Fabric Explore our new Interpretability Platform at Apply to our pilot program now for expanded remote model access via NDIF! See the current NDIF status! NSF National Deep Inference Fabric The NSF National Deep Inference Fabric is a research computing project that will enable us to crack open the mysteries inside large-scale Artificial Intelligence systems.

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 NSF 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. What is a Deep Inference Fabric?

A deep inference fabric is a high-performance computing fabric designed to support scientific experiments on running AI systems. The NSF National Deep Inference Fabric consists of a unique combination of hardware and software that provides a remotely-accessible computing resource for scientists and students to perform detailed and reproducible experiments on large pretrained AI models, such as open large language models.

grant from the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the leadership of NDIF and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.