Gov. Kathy Hochul’s Empire AI initiative has expanded rapidly over the past several weeks, with three more New York colleges slated to join the consortium of research institutions — which includes NYU — if budgetary plans are approved. Amid ongoing efforts at NYU to expand programming in science and technology, the $400 million initiative bolsters artificial intelligence research at the university.
In October, Hochul launched the first stage of Empire AI with a center housing 96 advanced computer processors in upstate New York. The seven founding institutions — including Columbia University, the State University of New York and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — along with other private partners, collectively invested $125 million in the initiative. In her proposal for next year’s budget, Hochul included $90 million in capital funding to support the inclusion of three more institutions into the consortium, each of which are set to invest an additional $50 million in Empire AI.
Christine Constantinople, a CAS assistant professor of neural science, said that the initiative is able to accelerate the progress of her lab’s research with access to artificial neural networks — AI models that replicate the function of human brains.
“A lot of the state-of-the-art research that academia is competing with is happening at big tech companies that have compute power and resources,” Constantinople said in an interview with WSN. “The goal of Empire AI is to basically provide that level of compute power in an academic research setting. It really changes the landscape of what’s possible to do in a lab.”
The initiative aims to increase the accessibility of state-of-the-art technology — previously exclusive to large companies such as Apple and Microsoft — to academic institutions. Hochul has also highlighted that Empire AI could create jobs and increase New York’s contribution to breakthrough AI research in the United States.
Last month, Cornell University received a $10.5 million gift from Tom Secunda, one of the founding investors in the consortium and co-founder of Bloomberg L.P., to fund research using Empire AI’s resources. In a Feb. 21 press release, Hochul detailed that the three prospective institutions would use Empire AI’s resources to advance medical research, AI learning and health care infrastructure.
In recent years, NYU has highlighted goals to increase science and technology resources and further its global presence in STEM fields. In addition to joining the Empire AI consortium, the university has also expanded funding for science and engineering facilities and employed Tandon dean Juan de Pablo as the university’s inaugural executive vice president for global science and technology.
“Empire AI was really helpful, because things that used to take us a week to run, you could finish in a day,” Constantinople told WSN. “It really accelerated the progress of the research and allowed us to be more rigorous and explore more parameter spaces because of the computer power.”
Contact Graylin Lucas at [email protected].