While the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan published this week features numerous novel approaches to keep the United States in a leading position in the global AI development and deployment race, one of the most striking of those is its call to develop a commodity-like market for compute resources.
That exact kind of market, according to market sources contacted by MeriTalk today, does not currently exist. But there are already cloud platform companies dedicated to providing compute resources for AI developers, and often based on specific models of graphic processing units (GPUs) used.
One of the many goals stated by the new AI Action Plan is to improve access to compute resources by smaller organizations like business startups and academic institutions.
“Currently, a company seeking to use largescale compute must often sign long-term contracts with hyperscalers – far beyond the budgetary reach of most academics and many startups,” the plan states.
It goes on to suggest that commoditizing access to compute can be an answer to that problem.
“America has solved this problem before with other goods through financial markets, such as spot and forward markets for commodities,” the plan says.
The plan goes on to suggest that “the Federal government can accelerate the maturation of a healthy financial market for compute,” and says that goal can be achieved through collaboration with industry, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the National Science Foundation’s National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot.
Specific to the NAIRR pilot, the AI Action Plan says that the pilot can be used to “partner with leading technology companies to increase the research community’s access to world-class private sector computing, models, data, and software resources.”
Also on the plan’s to-do list is to “build the foundations for a lean and sustainable NAIRR operations capability that can connect an increasing number of researchers and educators across the country to critical AI resources.”
Open Source, Open Weight
Elsewhere in the AI Action Plan, the administration is calling for the use of open source and open weight AI models that could be “made freely available by developers for anyone in the world to download and modify.”
“Models distributed this way have unique value for innovation because startups can use them flexibly without being dependent on a closed model provider,” the plan states.
“They also benefit commercial and government adoption of AI because many businesses and governments have sensitive data that they cannot send to closed model vendors,” the plan says.
“And they are essential for academic research, which often relies on access to the weights and training data of a model to perform scientifically rigorous experiments,” the plan adds.
“We need to ensure America has leading open models founded on American values,” it continues, adding that “open source and open-weight models could become global standards in some areas of business and in academic research worldwide. For that reason, they also have geostrategic value.”
While the “decision of whether and how to release an open or closed model is fundamentally up to the developer, the Federal government should create a supportive environment for open models,” the plan says.