Breakthrough AI Model from Atomic Canyon and ORNL Sets New Benchmarks in Nuclear Search

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Sept. 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Atomic Canyon, the leader in generative AI search for the nuclear energy sector, and the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) today announced the initial results of their collaboration. Within just six months, the team developed an advanced AI model capable of understanding complex nuclear terminology using the Frontier supercomputer (the world's fastest). This specialized open-source AI model has set new benchmarks for accuracy, efficiency and speed in AI search. Developed to be open source, the model will be available to ORNL, the nuclear national lab complex, independent researchers and nuclear institutions. It will also be integrated into Neutron, Atomic Canyon's AI search platform.

The model now returns the correct search result within the top ten results about 98% of the time, and within the top 5 results approximately 93% of the time, based on a new industry-first evaluation benchmark developed from real-world user queries. These independently verifiable initial results have validated Atomic Canyon's goal of an open source search platform that will streamline nuclear processes and regulatory review.

"Atomic Canyon has developed an AI model that will help propel nuclear energy development," says Thomas M. Evans, Group Lead and Distinguished R&D Staff at ORNL. "What they have achieved is significant: it will be a valuable tool for the research, engineering and deployment of nuclear energy and the transition to a future powered by sustainable energy."

"Our collaboration with ORNL and the use of Frontier has enabled us to develop a tool that is not just a research milestone but a practical, commercial application that will transform data management within the nuclear sector," said Kristian Kielhofner, co-founder and CTO of Atomic Canyon. "This AI model fundamentally changes how the nuclear industry interacts with vast, complex datasets, making data retrieval faster and more reliable than ever before."

By utilizing state-of-the-art sentence-embedding algorithms, the model accurately interprets and processes complex nuclear terminology, achieving unparalleled performance metrics in the industry.

The AI model was developed to handle larger contexts, allowing for more comprehensive processing of nuclear data and enabling faster, more accurate searches across very large regulatory databases. Additionally, it employs the world's first commercially usable SPLADEv2 sparse embedding model, setting new standards in AI-driven nuclear search.

"The use of AI technology to do this sort of necessary, but tedious, work is a meaningful first step along the long road to licensing, and Frontier provides a terrific resource to train these types of models" said Bronson Messer, director of science for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which is home to the Frontier supercomputer.

Using the Frontier supercomputer, Atomic Canyon trained the AI model on publicly available documents from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) Agency-wide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS). By making the resulting AI model open source, Atomic Canyon hopes to enable nuclear stakeholders, such as researchers and plant managers, to build on their work to innovate for a safe, clean, sustainable, nuclear future.

In partnership with ORNL, Atomic Canyon will continue to refine and expand the model's capabilities using Frontier over the next six months, with plans to release subsequent versions.

For more information, visit Atomic Canyon's website.

About Atomic Canyon
AI powers the future at Atomic Canyon. Utilizing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's database and the world's fastest supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Atomic Canyon's generative AI processes nuclear terminology with unmatched precision. The industry-leading AI model, designed specifically for nuclear data, delivers safe and accurate solutions to nuclear challenges.

Atomic Canyon was founded by CEO Trey Lauderdale (previously CEO and Founder of Voalte, acquired for $180m) and CTO and Co-Founder Kristian Kielhofner (previously CTO of Star 2 Star Communications, acquired for $437m).

Atomic Canyon's AI platform is designed for use in and by nuclear power plants, manufacturers of next-generation reactors, and government and national laboratories.

About Oak Ridge National Laboratory 
The OLCF is a DOE Office of Science User Facility. UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE's Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE's Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science.

SOURCE Atomic Canyon