Open Athena is a nonprofit that accelerates academia with capabilities from the AI frontier

AI is transforming how discovery happens, but the ability to build and adapt large foundation models is concentrated inside industry.

Open Athena provides labs with engineers, compute, and coordination to transform promising prototypes into breakthrough foundation models that are developed openly and sustained within academic systems.

projects

Here's a selection of our current projects

Marin

Open development large language models

With Stanford, Open Athena is building a fully open platform for research and development of foundation models.
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Explore Marin
PlantCAD + GeneCAD

DNA foundation model for plant genomics

In partnership with Cornell, PlantCAD teaches AI to read plant DNA, while GeneCAD identifies the genes responsible for shaping growth, yield, and resilience.
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Explore PlantCAD + GeneCAD
FOMO

Climate and ocean modeling at planetary scale

Developed with NYU and MIT, FOMO trains AI to emulate ocean behavior hundreds of times faster than traditional simulations, creating open, high-resolution models that advance global climate research.
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Explore FOMO
testimonials

What our partners are saying1

1  The strongest proof of impact is what our collaborators share: scientists, PIs, and engineers who have seen Open Athena in action.

Cornell

“In addition to helping individual labs and projects make a greater impact, we intend for our work to build a platform of open source software that accelerates scientific discoveries for everyone.”
Michael Kotlikoff, President of Cornell University

MIT

“In addition to helping individual labs and projects make a greater impact, we intend for our work to build a platform of open source software that accelerates scientific discoveries for everyone.”
Michael Kotlikoff, President of Cornell University

Stanford

“In addition to helping individual labs and projects make a greater impact, we intend for our work to build a platform of open source software that accelerates scientific discoveries for everyone.”
Michael Kotlikoff, President of Cornell University
Our Model

Build together.
Share openly.
Advance science.

For Labs:

  • We provide engineering talent, compute resources, and project coordination.
  • You bring the scientific expertise, the questions, and the data.
  • Together we build models that grow into shared scientific infrastructure.
Propose a Collaboration

For Engineers:

  • Work on frontier problems with real scientific impact.
  • Contribute to development in the open: code, models, and tools.
  • Join hubs in New York, London, San Francisco, and Boston.
Apply to Join

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