What is the A.I. Sandbox?

The Princeton A.I. Sandbox service provides a secure environment for researchers to make use of multiple Large Language Models (LLMs). Access to the models is provided via a web-based chat interface and also via a programming API. Additional information can be found in this presentation by Spyglass MTG.

Additional Resources

How to Get an Account?

All account requests must come from a faculty member. Researchers and students should direct their faculty sponsor to the “Access” section on the Princeton A.I. Sandbox page.

Using the A.I. Sandbox from the Research Computing Clusters

The chat and API workloads of the Sandbox are executed using cloud resources. This is sufficient for the majority of Sandbox users. One can also combine the Sandbox with the high-performance computing resources of Research Computing.

Special access to the A.I. Sandbox from the compute nodes of the Research Computing clusters is made available by loading the following environment module:

module load proxy/default

Note that this module can only be used on compute nodes (not login nodes). Learn more about the proxy/default module. Here is a  Slurm script example of running a Python code that uses the Sandbox from the Research Computing clusters:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --job-name=sandbox       # create a short name for your job
#SBATCH --nodes=1                # node count
#SBATCH --ntasks=1               # total number of tasks across all nodes
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=1        # cpu-cores per task (>1 if multi-threaded tasks)
#SBATCH --mem-per-cpu=4G         # memory per cpu-core (4G per cpu-core is default)
#SBATCH --time=01:00:00          # total run time limit (HH:MM:SS)
#SBATCH --mail-type=begin        # send email when job begins
#SBATCH --mail-type=end          # send email when job ends

module purge
module load proxy/default
module load anaconda3/2024.10
conda activate myenv

export AI_SANDBOX_KEY=<key provided to you>

python myscript.py

See myscript.py on GitHub for an example Python script that calls the Sandbox.

Getting Help

The A.I. Sandbox is maintained by OIT. If you have questions or issues then please contact OIT. If your issue relates to using the Sandbox on the Research Computing systems then please see our support page.