What Better Place To Inject OpenAI's O1 Than Los Alamos National Lab, Right?

OpenAI has announced another deal with Uncle Sam, this time to get its very latest models in the hands of US government scientists working on nuclear security and more.

The Microsoft-backed AI maker today announced a US national lab partnership that will start with deployment of its reasoning-capable o1 LLM on Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) Venado supercomputer. The Nvidia-powered beast of a machine is designed for artificial intelligence workloads, which OpenAI hopes will supercharge its model to enable various scientific breakthroughs. 

According to OpenAI, LANL will use o1 to identify new approaches to treating diseases, protect the US power grid, enhance America's cyber and general security, contribute to high-energy physics research, and more. 

The announcement also plays into President Trump's prior executive order on US energy leadership, citing o1 at LLNL as "unlocking the full potential of natural resources and revolutionizing the nation's energy infrastructure" as well as "accelerating the basic science that underpins US global technological leadership." 

o1, like the headline-grabbing DeepSeek R1 model that came out of China recently, is a chain-of-thought model that's supposed to hallucinate less and spit out better answers to queries by visibly thinking through problems.

The Venado o1 resource will also be accessible to researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory. All three labs will collaborate on a nuclear security program that OpenAI said will focus on reducing risk of nuclear war and securing nuclear materials and weapons around the world. 

"This use case is highly consequential, and we believe it is critical for OpenAI to support it as part of our commitment to national security," the ChatGPT outfit said, adding: "Our partnership will support this work, with careful and selective review of use cases and consultations on AI safety from OpenAI researchers with security clearances."

OpenAI and LANL have worked together in the past, with the pair collaborating last year to investigate the use of AI in bioscientific research. That program, which involved using GPT-4o in wet labs to assess the risk of artificial intelligence being used to develop bioweapons, is being built on with the latest partnership, OpenAI said. 

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We reached out to OpenAI to see whether it was planning to expand its national lab partnership beyond LANL and the other facilities that will get access to o1 on Venado, and didn't hear back. It's kinda amusing that the supercomputer is getting o1 at the same time Microsoft, which helped bankroll OpenAI, has promised to roll out the model for free to all Copilot users.

The lab partnership is the second announcement OpenAI made this week about working with the US government. The biz on Tuesday announced the release of ChatGPT Gov, a variant of ChatGPT Enterprise designed for use by the public sector. 

OpenAI, whose products have been trialed in several state governments and federal agencies prior to the launch of ChatGPT Gov, said it hoped the new product would expedite its desire to be authorized to handle "non-public sensitive data," a process it is currently working through. ®