The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $150,000 EAGER: NAIRR PILOT Project Grant to the University of South Carolina (USC) on February 1, 2025. The purpose of this 2-year project is to investigate an alternative approach to building and training a specialized artificial intelligence (AI) model that can be applied to planning-like tasks, with the goal of outperforming and being more efficient and understandable than current general-purpose large language models. The project aims to create a comprehensive yet compact foundation model for planning-like tasks from scratch, using innovative methods for tokenization, training, and other steps. The model development process, resulting AI infrastructure, and outreach activities will engage research communities across multiple academic disciplines, including minority-serving institutions, to help overcome resource barriers and democratize knowledge, especially for underserved communities.