JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Bringing artificial intelligence to Jacksonville is one of the goals of a proposed $200 million University of Florida graduate school that would focus on innovating programs in medicine, business and engineering.
“Society needs to be prepared for disruption, for changes in the workplace,” said Joe Glover, who is the provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at UF. “Jobs that used to be done by people may be done in the future by robots, or by some other means governed by AI.”
UF is pushing to be the nation’s first “AI university” by making it a part of every student’s education and boasting one of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
“We can expect our lives to change,” Glover said.
He said the AI revolution will be at least as impactful as the personal computer revolution.
“When you go to see the doctor, it’ll rely on this tool. When you go to build a car or drive a car, it will rely on this tool. When you get up in the morning and go into the kitchen to order your groceries, cook your meal -- it will all rely on this tool,” Glover said.
UF research computing director Erik Deumens said if AI is effective, you don’t even notice it’s there.
“The ideal functioning of AI will just make certain things that we would like to have happen,” Deumens said.
It sounds like magic, but behind it is a complex web of supercomputers that can process vast amounts of data.
Among those supercomputers is UF’s HiPerGator in Gainesville. It’s thousands of times more powerful than a laptop, consisting of 5,000 square feet of computing power with 10 miles of fiber optic cable, Deumens said.
HiPerGator has been expanding at the university over the past decade, helped by a $50 million donation in 2019 from UF alum Chris Malachowsky and his Silicon Valley company NVIDIA.
“He just came down the hallway to me one day and said, ‘What would you do with an AI supercomputer if I gave it to you?’” Glover said.
The provost’s split-second response? Making AI training available to every student in every major at every level.
“It turned out to be an answer that he liked,” Glover said. “We are absolutely unique in doing this. No other university in the United States is doing this yet.”
Before News4JAX’s crew could enter HiPerGator’s chamber, we had to put on headphones with built-in walkie-talkies to communicate over the sound of the ventilation system.
The heat generated by hardware requires high-powered cooling fans. It can get as loud as a jet engine. Deumens said HiPerGator’s electricity bill costs about $3.5 million a year.
Deumans explained that researchers feed vast amounts of information into two storage systems. Cables transport the data throughout the supercomputer, where algorithms analyze it faster than people could. Researchers are using the supercomputer’s AI technology to develop tools to predict sea level rise, grow crops more efficiently, and even improve health care outcomes.
Engineers fed in 10 years of anonymized medical notes from patients at UF Health into a model called “GatorTron.” The goal is to use that information to give doctors an extra layer of insight into potential patient outcomes and quickly identify patients who might qualify to participate in clinical trials.
Jacksonville could soon be at the intersection of AI and medicine. The city has approved up to $50 million, and the state of Florida has set aside another $75 million for a UF Health and Financial Technology Graduate Education Center that would eventually support a student population of about 10,000.
However, critics are concerned about the big price tag and vague details.
“I was just worried that the taxpayers are being burdened with it. There’s a lot of things that we’ve made exceptions for. We don’t really have a location, we don’t have if it’s going to be a campus or if it’s going to be a center, there’s just a lot of ifs,” City Councilman Al Ferraro told News4JAX in March. He was the sole “no” vote on the first round of funding.
Proponents say it would propel economic development in Jacksonville and help the country.
“The National Security Commission on AI identified one of the real threats to America being that we are not building an AI workforce at the same rate as our competitor nations. That’s both a national security threat and an economic security threat. But that report didn’t have any strategy to actually build that workforce,” Glover said.
He said what they’re doing at the University of Florida could serve as a model for the nation to build that AI workforce.
It’s not yet clear where in Jacksonville a UF graduate school campus might go, but Jaguars owner Shad Khan wants it to be built at the current location of the Jacksonville Fairgrounds near TIAA Bank Field. He’s pledged to donate the 14 acres of the fairgrounds for the campus if UF chooses to put the project there.