Launching the Genesis Mission

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/11/launching-the-genesis-mission/

by oidar • 8 months ago

31 3 8 months ago

From the challenges outlined in Section 4, Identification of National Science and Technology Challenges:

  advanced manufacturing;
  biotechnology;
  critical materials;
  nuclear fission and fusion energy;
  quantum information science; and
  semiconductors and microelectronics.

I have no clue what AI is going to do for most of these sectors/challenges & to me the problem-spaces feel largely non-virtualizable. Massive training & hallucination systems aren't going to happen into great yields regularly, not in a way that justifies the cost.

One place I do think that virtual science can make a huge difference is the last one, semiconductors and microelectronics. IMO there's already enormously promising work, that just needs more funding. Maybe bigger clusters would help some, but mostly, this field needs more works like the incredibly successful OpenROAD work that DARPA begot in 2018 with the Intelligent Design of Electronic Assets (IDEA) program. https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/intelligent-design-o... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenROAD_Project

We should fund better AI powered chip synthesis tools, better open source chip design tools, more open source cpu design, and fund Silicon Foundry projects to build & test promising open source hardware cores. Some focus/personel/money here would go far far further IMO than a seemingly non-funded executive order to get the DoE to scrounge together some systems & command them to make an innovation or two.

TheAceOfHearts• 8 months ago

Genuinely uncertain about these claims but I think it's worth engaging:

Doesn't the existence of AlphaFold suggest that there's potential AI to help with biotechnology? Also, one of the AlphaFold creators started a biotechnology startup.

And for fusion, couldn't we build AI models to explore better magnetic containment techniques? As I understand it, the fundamentals and science behind magnetic containment of fusion is pretty simple, but the execution and design of the reactor(?) is the challenging problem.

As for advanced manufacturing, I've seen some research where evolutionary algorithms are used to design a part under specific constraints. Part of that problem space seems like it might benefit from AI research.

ricksunny• 8 months ago

"Section 1. Purpose. From the founding of our Republic, scientific discovery and technological innovation have driven American progress and prosperity. Today, America is in a race for global technology dominance in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), an important frontier of scientific discovery and economic growth. To that end, my Administration has taken a number of actions to win that race, including issuing multiple Executive Orders and implementing America’s AI Action Plan, which recognizes the need to invest in AI-enabled science to accelerate scientific advancement. In this pivotal moment, the challenges we face require a historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project that was instrumental to our victory in World War II and was a critical basis for the foundation of the Department of Energy (DOE) and its national laboratories.

This order launches the “Genesis Mission” as a dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century. The Genesis Mission will build an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets — the world’s largest collection of such datasets, developed over decades of Federal investments — to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs. The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources — combining the efforts of brilliant American scientists, including those at our national laboratories, with pioneering American businesses; world-renowned universities; and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, production plants, and national security sites — to achieve dramatic acceleration in AI development and utilization. "

Launching the Genesis Mission

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