Yale announces $150 million to support leadership in AI

Yale will commit more than $150 million over the next five years to support faculty, students, and staff as they engage with artificial intelligence (AI), the university announced today.

The investment will help the community develop, use, and evaluate AI and apply it to deliver breakthrough research at an unprecedented speed and scale, Yale Provost Scott Strobel wrote in a message to the Yale community. It will support key areas, including compute infrastructure, community access to secure generative AI tools, targeted faculty hires, seed grants, and opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration.

“Yale has long been at the forefront of AI development and research, and our leadership continues to be necessary as this technology evolves and endures,” Strobel said. “To fulfill the university’s mission to improve the world and prepare the next generation of society’s great leaders and thinkers, we must explore, advance, and harness AI for its benefits while providing ethical, legal, and social frameworks to address the challenges it poses.”

The commitment will benefit all of campus while contributing to school- and unit-specific AI strategies, including curricular, research, and recruitment goals that each dean has identified for the coming year, he said.

The $150 million commitment responds to the report of the Yale Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. During the spring, the 18-member group of faculty and campus leaders engaged with dean-led faculty panels and university experts in education, collections, clinical practice, and operations to review AI activity already underway and develop a vision for Yale’s leadership in the future.

The task force recommendations guide the following commitments:

Expanding research infrastructure

Over the next several years, Yale will build a portfolio of approximately 450 graphics processing units (GPUs) — advanced processors that have become foundational to modern AI development — invest in cloud-based GPU access, and hire new computational research support analysts.

When paired with high performance computing clusters and advanced GPUs, AI enables processing and analysis of big data sets, advanced simulations, and more, Strobel said. This allows investigators to conduct research on and with AI in ways not possible using traditional computers alone. Such research can enable drug discovery, enhance understanding of biological and physical systems, track migration patterns, and reconstruct historical sites, among many other innovative applications.

To facilitate these complex AI computations, the task force advised that the university invest in several hundred GPUs, enable cloud access to additional GPUs through technology providers, and explore partnerships with other institutions seeking to share compute resources, Strobel said.

The new commitment will support:

A portfolio of GPUs: The university will stagger purchases of the approximately 450 GPUs “to naturally track with the anticipated rapid evolution of GPU technology,” Strobel said.

Most of these new GPUs will be installed on clusters maintained by the Yale Center for Research Computing (YCRC) and located at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), a LEED Platinum certified data center and joint venture between Yale and several other universities. To supplement these resources, the university will also invest in cloud-based GPU access, expanding capacity for research that demands a very large number of GPUs for short periods of time.

Computational research support analysts: To support researchers across campus as they access this new AI infrastructure, the YCRC will hire new computational research support analysts to join its existing research support team. These professionals will offer training and assist members of the community as they advance their research using new GPU-intensive compute resources.

Delivering secure access to generative AI

If the Yale community is to shape how AI is developed, experiment with its possibilities, and evaluate its role in society, the AI task force concluded, it must have equitable access to generative AI, Strobel said.

Specifically, he said, the task force recommended that Yale procure or develop secure generative AI tools capable of protecting individual and university data and adapting to new innovations over time. In response, the university will launch the Clarity platform, which will provide faculty, students, and staff with secure access to robust AI tools.

The Clarity platform: In its initial phase, Clarity offers an AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o. Importantly, Clarity provides a “walled-off” environment; its use is limited to Yale faculty, students, and staff, and information entered into its chatbot is not saved or used to train external AI models.

Clarity is appropriate for use with all data types, including high-risk data, provided that all security standards are observed, Strobel said. Its chatbot is capable of content creation, coding assistance, data and image analysis, text-to-speech, and more. Over time, the platform may expand to incorporate additional AI tools, including other large language models. Clarity is designed to evolve as generative AI develops and the community offers feedback. (Before using the Clarity AI chatbot, Strobel said, members of the Yale community should review training resources and guidance on appropriate use.)

Additional AI tools: In addition to Clarity, the university will also offer faculty, students, and staff access to other AI tools, including Microsoft Copilot Enterprise and Adobe Firefly. More information about these tools, including instructions and training material, is available on the AI at Yale website, a new and evolving hub of information about AI at the university. Additional details on AI tools will be shared with the community soon.

Building expertise to support research and education

In addition to offering secure AI tools, Yale will broaden and deepen its expertise in AI to advance research, scholarship, and education, Strobel said. These will include:

Faculty positions: While meeting with faculty and leaders across campus, the task force observed the breadth of Yale’s engagement with AI. Many of the university’s researchers and scholars have been developing, utilizing, and analyzing AI for years. Their breakthroughs and insights — from using AI to produce faster medical diagnoses to examining AI’s impact on human labor — are producing knowledge that impacts lives around the world, Strobel said. In addition, faculty are increasingly engaging with AI in their teaching, using it as a tool and a phenomenon to study and critique.

To further expand Yale’s capacity for AI-related research, teaching, and learning, the university expects to recruit more than 20 faculty whose scholarship centers on AI technology. In the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), the School of Engineering & Applied Science (SEAS), and the School of Medicine, deans are allocating positions, some recently created through the expansion of the FAS and SEAS faculty, to supplement existing capabilities in AI research, application, and development, Strobel wrote.

Spread across campus, these targeted positions will support field-specific approaches to AI while creating opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration.

“Additional faculty expertise will strengthen Yale’s depth of knowledge and enhance the learning environment for students, who will be expected to understand, navigate, and make decisions about AI technologies throughout their lives and careers,” Strobel said.

Seed grants for reviewing curricula in the context of AI: Addressing the need to prepare Yale’s graduates to lead and thrive in a future infused with AI, the task force acknowledged Yale’s “opportunity to serve as a model by adapting its curricula.” Deans and faculty are already implementing innovative changes to coursework and offering answers to questions about what it means to teach and train in this new age, Strobel said.

To aid their work, the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning will pilot curriculum review grants this year, assisting schools and departments as they examine their programs and disciplines in the context of AI. These grants will facilitate pioneering approaches to curriculum review and design. The learning opportunities that result will give students the range of skills needed to shape AI and its role in their professions and communities.

The Poorvu Center will share more information about these grant opportunities later this year, Strobel said.

Facilitating innovation and collaboration

Though the task force noted “rich disciplinary distinctions” in school and unit approaches to AI, it also remarked on the critical contributions Yale makes by “draw[ing] on expertise from the full breadth of its diverse community…” The task force members encouraged the university to create “catalysts for collaboration” that exploit Yale’s strength in cross- and inter-disciplinary research and scholarship, Strobel said.

To leverage Yale’s wide-ranging expertise and perspectives on AI, Strobel said, the university will offer opportunities for innovation and collaboration across schools, units, departments, and disciplines. This academic year, Yale will host a campus-wide research symposium on AI, inviting faculty, students, and staff to present research, share ideas, and establish connections across intellectual boundaries.

To offer a variety of ways to engage, the university will also sponsor interdisciplinary AI prompt-a-thons, seminars, and a research seed grant program, he said. Additionally, the Yale University Library will play a key role in facilitating research and educational innovation throughout the community, offering support and AI-powered tools to improve access to digitized collections and unlock new research possibilities. Details will be posted to the AI at Yale website.

“Whether you are studying, teaching, researching, or working at Yale, I encourage you to explore the resources available now and engage with the opportunities to come,” Strobel wrote in his message. “Members of our community — from Information Technology to the Library to deans’ offices — continue to work diligently to implement these investments.”

Strobel expressed gratitude to Jenny Frederick, associate provost for academic initiatives and executive director of the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, for her work in “orchestrating AI investments across campus.”

“As we advance Yale’s leadership in AI, let us embrace one of the fundamental tenets of a university: curiosity,” he added. “Our willingness to share — with each other and with the world — various perspectives, ideas, evaluations, and analyses will be critical to our success.

“Our efforts will equip society and the next generation with the tools and frameworks necessary to positively shape a world continuously transformed by technological innovation.”