Helping academic labs create better AI models and do more science

Open Athena partners with leading academic labs building large AI models. We help solve technology challenges so labs can focus on their science.

Our Hypothesis

Scientific foundation models1 will be critical infrastructure for a new era of major scientific discoveries.2

This hypothesis should be tested.3

1  Inspired by the definition from the Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models: A model that is trained on broad scientific data, typically using self-supervision at scale, and can be adapted to a wide range of downstream scientific tasks.

2  This has already happened in natural language processing with the GPT series of models and in structural biology with AlphaFold. What once took years and millions of dollars now has been made free and open source.

3  Scientific foundation models have been created and are being used in many scientific domains already.

While early results are promising, the potential impact is limited by data and model scale, cost, and quality.

Open Athena will help labs across multiple scientific domains build and deploy scientific foundation models to determine if they can revolutionize more than just natural language processing and structural biology.

Our Model

Academic labs provide the ideal environment to make new scientific foundation models.

Engineers from industry have the expertise to scale these prototypes and make them useful.

Open Athena helps labs make their AI models better by providing:

1

Experienced data and machine learning engineers

2

Access to infrastructure to train and host their models

In addition to helping individual labs and projects make a greater impact, we intend to build software and resources to accelerate scientific discoveries for everyone.4

4  We believe working across labs, foundation model projects, and scientific domains will reveal insights into common challenges that we can solve with open source software that any lab can use to do more science.

Team

Open Athena is led by engineers who have built software infrastructure for large organizations like Apple, Meta, and Two Sigma.

Leadership
David Siegel
Founder and Chairman
Jeff Hammerbacher
Founder and Co-CEO
Mike Abbott
Founder and Co-CEO
Camille Fournier
Founding CTO
Jared Crooks
Founding COO & CSO
Advisors
Lorin Crawford
Jonathan Frankle