The Genesis Mission aims to provide researchers with the computing power and data sets necessary to train artificial-intelligence models.Credit: William Potter/iStock via Getty
The White House has launched a plan to accelerate research in the United States, by building artificial intelligence (AI) models on the rich scientific data sets held by the country’s 17 national laboratories, as well as harnessing their enormous computing resources.
An executive order issued on 24 November instructs the US Department of Energy (DoE) to create a platform through which academic researchers and AI firms can create powerful AI models using the government’s scientific data. Framed as part of a race for global technology dominance, it lists collaborations with technology firms including Microsoft, IBM, OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, as well as quantum-computing companies such as Quantinuum. Such a vast public–private partnership would give companies unprecedented access to federal scientific data sets for AI-driven analysis.
The effort, dubbed the Genesis Mission, aims to “double the productivity and impact of American research and innovation within a decade”, in a variety of fields from fusion energy to medicine. The project expects to “unlock breakthroughs in medicine, energy, materials science, and beyond”, says Michael Kratsios, the US president’s science adviser. It also aims to build AI agents — general models with the ability to harness tools such as specialized software and coding suites — that can generate hypotheses and automate research workflows.
Labs around the world are already training AI systems on scientific data, to boost their capabilities in scientific domains and attempting to use AI models to make discoveries. But some researchers remain sceptical that general AI tools are capable of making truly fresh insights, and warn that their inherent flaws make the value of agents unclear.
The new US initiative formalizes and expands ongoing AI research efforts by the administration of President Donald Trump. “The impact is that it enables many more scientists and researchers to have access to all of the infrastructure that they need to explore important scientific questions that the country cares about,” says Lynne Parker, a robotics engineer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and who led AI-policy initiatives for the administrations of Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, but was not involved in the current initiative. “That really has not been possible before.”
Supercomputers at national laboratories, including the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, will probably be used as part of the Genesis Mission.Credit: Argonne National Laboratory/Getty
Trump’s team has been working to funnel money and attention to AI projects even as it tries to gut federal research spending more broadly. The White House has the power to shape the direction of research at the DoE’s network of national laboratories. It did not give an estimated price tag for the AI initiative; any extra funding beyond the laboratories’ normal budgets would have to be approved by the US Congress.
Nature looks at how the project might affect researchers and AI companies, and its promises and risks.
What are government-funded scientists being asked to do?
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