High-impact AI solutions to global challenges are within reach. Here’s how Massachusetts’ big bet on equity and collaboration helps.
Opportunities for AI development in open source got a big boost in December when Massachusetts Governor Maura Healy signed the Mass Leads Act supporting the creation of a Massachusetts AI Hub. The AI hub will serve as a nexus of AI innovation and facilitate collaboration among government, industry, academia, nonprofits, and startups. The AI Hub will be supported by joint investments from Massachusetts and partner universities in the Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) that are expected to exceed more than $100 million over the next five years. According to the governor’s press release, the AI Hub will also leverage other funding opportunities from the more than $2 billion planned for life sciences and climate tech initiatives. The Massachusetts AI Strategic Task Force report states that the AI Hub is expected to leverage existing infrastructure assets including the Mass Open Cloud (MOC) and the MGHPCC.
Red Hat Research has been heavily involved in the MOC and MGHPCC since 2015. The creation of the AI Hub confirms Red Hat Research’s position that access to massive scale compute, large diverse data sets, AI tools, and AI models will play a fundamental role in addressing inequality, access to healthcare, climate change, education, and many other global challenges. Our partnerships and our focus on platforms and systems engineering have given us the means and flexibility to pivot to supporting AI development at a time when the stakes and the opportunity have never been higher. As plans for the AI Hub develop, we are excited to contribute our expertise and resources to further develop the MOC and help the Commonwealth meet its mission
How the Massachusetts AI Hub will help drive AI innovation
We at Red Hat Research agree with the Massachusetts AI Strategic Task Force that driving technology innovation depends on more than technological infrastructure. The AI Hub focuses on three core components that align closely with the mission of Red Hat Research:
Equity and values: Accelerating the equitable, ethical, and transparent development of AI for public benefit. We believe that open source will play a critical role in realizing these goals. Not only will open source development ensure transparency, it will lead to technology that can be adopted and implemented by anyone, anywhere. We also know that for non-specialists, advanced AI tools can be hard to learn, especially when they change frequently. That’s why we’ve worked to make solutions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI, Red Hat Open Shift, and Red Hat OpenShift AI accessible through the MOC.
Expanding and enhancing infrastructure: Providing equitable access to computational power through high-performance computing (HPC) resources and making high quality, ethically governed datasets available. The Mass Leads Act establishes the Massachusetts Data Commons, with an emphasis on rigorous quality control, addressing data gaps, and the ethical use of data. The Data Commons will apply the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management, ensuring that data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable to maximize the possibilities for sharing and collaboration. Just as important, the AI Hub will provide leadership for data management practices across the industry.
Innovation and talent ecosystem: Enabling partnerships among academia and industry and engaging a broad community to accelerate development, foster startup growth, reduce barriers to participation in AI, and support workforce development. This will drive innovation not just in AI-focused enterprises, but in storage, compute, quantum, and other areas impacting the cloud.
Expanding our impact in AI
We’ve only just begun to see the impact of state investment in AI through initiatives like the AI for Drug Discovery forum held in October 2024. Secretary of the Executive Office of Economic Development and Co-Chair of the AI Strategic Task Force Yvonne Hao told attendees that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is betting on open source initiatives and practices to make AI technology for life sciences a reality.
Massachusetts’ recognition of the dramatic impact AI will have across research, startups, and large enterprises is great news for local universities and businesses, and its influence reaches well beyond state borders. The AI Hub creates a template for other states, and it opens the door to expanding and replicating the MOC in other regions. We see a real opportunity to use AI to make a major impact in society, and we’re excited about what’s next.
Visit the MOC Alliance website to learn more about its role in the Massachusetts AI Hub and other initiatives.
About the MOC Alliance
The Mass Open Cloud (MOC) Alliance is a collaboration between academic institutions and industry/open source partners that has created an open cloud for research and education. It offers nonprofits facilitator-supported services at a fraction of the price of the public cloud. This has enabled, for example, the integration of cloud resources into courses used by thousands of students at Boston University and Northeastern University, the development of new capabilities for analyzing social science datasets at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the application of cloud-based AI to problems in pediatric radiology at Boston Children’s Hospital.
The MOC-A shares all their software, configuration information, continuous deployment procedures, and telemetry in open source repositories and datasets. This transparency, along with academic institution governance, enables academic researchers, open source developers, research IT, and industry to work together to rapidly enhance a cloud whose fundamental goal is to maximize impact rather than revenue.
Future objectives include expanding the MOC to additional geographies, addressing a broader set of use cases, increasing facilitation needed to democratize access to many more users, and engaging philanthropic organizations to support use by projects with broad social impact.
