Meta's AI models are powering the first wave of Genesis Mission projects

https://ai.meta.com/blog/genesis-mission-lawrence-berkeley-national-laboratory-segment-anything-dino/?_fb_noscript=1

by surprisetalk • 1 day ago

97 88 1 day ago

ai.meta.com

https://www.energy.gov/undersecretaryforscience/genesis-miss...

jyr0s• 1 day ago

this page hijacks your tab's back button history :\

abirch• 1 day ago

Well Meta has hijacked my privacy. Now IRL Meta can track me from the people wearing their sunglasses.

ninju• 1 day ago

how so...back button history is fine for me (Chrome/Windows)

Zaheer2• 1 day ago

This fits with my impression of the 'personality' of various models:

Meta: Perceptive (strong vision)

Gemini: Fastest

Claude: Smartest

OpenAI: Prettiest

economistbob• 1 day ago

Qwen: Zestiest

Nemo: Straightest

DeepSeek: Craftiest

munk-a5• 1 day ago

And, of course, Grok: Sir-not-appearing-in-this-listest

kubrickslair• 1 day ago

Why do you think OpenAI is the prettiest?

Claude often makes better looking interfaces and designs. And I think OpenAI has solved more open math/ stats/ CS problems.

embedding-shape2• 1 day ago

Claude often makes better looking interfaces and designs

How do you even qualify this? Either by "Well, when you're not specifying anything about it in the prompt" and then it almost doesn't matter at all, or by what actually goes into the prompt, then again it doesn't matter at all what model you use, more about the person driving it.

giancarlostoro2• 1 day ago

And I think OpenAI has solved more open math/ stats/ CS problems.

Still surprises me that OpenAI seems to lead in this one weird niche, I wonder what causes GPT to be able to routinely pull this off, there was one instance where some random 18 year old broke some mathematical question without knowing more than high school math if I remember correctly, all because of GPT.

Zaheer2• 1 day ago

Their text output often includes more emojis and seems formatted better. Also their image models subjectively looks better than the rest.

noodlescb3• 1 day ago

I love how consistently none of us even vaguely consider Grok an actual player

airstrafer• 1 day ago

The models might be good but the product design, user story, and marketing is so terrible that it’s difficult to see it as more than an also-ran

pram• 1 day ago

To Grok's credit I think it's fairly good as a creative writing tool because it can be very "spontaneous" and it naturally seems to use an informal style. It also lacks a lot of the words and phrasing Claude and OpenAI get hyper-fixated on.

IDK if this is emergent from being trained on an endless trough of Twitter shitposts but compared to how stiff the rest are, I consider it a feature. I wouldn't use it for anything important though, heh.

satvikpendem7• 11 hours ago

Grok 4.5 is Opus (perhaps 4.6 or 4.7 or so) class at coding, at a very high speed and a fraction of the cost. It beats Gemini models, even the latest 3.6 Flash, at every metric.

hgoel3• 1 day ago

They aren't talking about vision LLMs though. SAM and DINO are vision models, no LLM involved.

theplumber• 1 day ago

I would replace Gemini with DeepSeek. I also find OpenAI smarter than Claude but Claude is better for API ergonomics and frontend

nine_k• 1 day ago

The scoop: X-ray imaging of various strictures for scientific purposes produces colossal reams of data, previously hard to analyze. Meta provides machine analysis, both segmentation and classification, using unsupervised learning models.

a fully reconstructed, semantically labeled 3D volume delivered back to the scientist physically standing at the beamline [x-ray] instrument, ready for interpretation while the experiment is still running. Total turnaround: approximately 15 minutes.

iLoveOncall2• 1 day ago

So, not LLM models, right?

Also on this:

The numbers are staggering: The DOE's light and neutron source facilities now produce tens of petabytes of data annually

Come on, petabytes are not staggering for entreprise software.

munk-a5• 1 day ago

I used to work with images representing scans of brain tissue - for a full brain visualization at one horizontal slice terabytes was a common measure and the resolution of those images wasn't even particularly detailed - all the full resolution stuff was taken of tiny sub-sections of interest. This was also two decades ago - so I'm sure they've upped their game.

momojo2• 1 day ago

My company does whole-brain scans of mice on a Zeiss Z.1. Lower resolutions are typically in the low hundreds of GB. Higher-resolutions and multichannel staining can get you in the TB range. When a typical client is doing 10's of brains it definitely adds up. But even for us (and I consider us a smaller operation) we aren't output PB's. So I'd consider the above claim still pretty impressive.

ben_w2• 1 day ago

I'm not sure exactly which enterprises you have in mind, but sure: quantities which can be expressed as "a year's worth fits on my desk" should not be described as "staggering", and 10 PB of hard drives will (just about) fit on my desk.

The LHC, on the other hand, that generates a petabyte a second and has to throw most of it away for obvious reasons:

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/computing-for-the-large-hadro...

satvikpendem7• 11 hours ago

Large language models models. Just say LLMs.

iLoveOncall2• 7 hours ago

Nah I prefer LLM models. Or LLM AI models.

nonameiguess• 1 day ago

Gonna need to have a talk with LLNL. I'm sure they didn't choose the name, but seems a tad leaning in to use the name of tech from Star Trek meant to produce untold abundance that instead became an unintentional doomsday device.

mawadev• 1 day ago

That is — incredible

rozap• 1 day ago

Really fascinating writeup — I particularly appreciated how they didn't hesitate to delve into the load bearing design choices — the implications are staggering.

davrosthedalek2• 22 hours ago

Too many spaces around the --. That's not load-bearing.

6stringmerc• 1 day ago

As a former proposal specialist (B2B, B2G, non DoD) I looked into the Genesis Mission procurement site and process.

Unless someone can correct me, the total amount of grant monies is $280,000,000 or so.

It became obvious that it’s not worth my time to engage in the “mission” as they call it, even if I could benefit some worthwhile causes.

That’s a pittance and pretty insulting to the purported benefit of funding scientific endeavors. I’m not even attempting to be political here. $280 Million versus $XX Billion for warfighting is a seriously gross misallocation of public monies, IMHO.

Total lackluster reporting on the scale and scope of the actual numbers, but not surprising.

philipwhiuk• 1 day ago

It's a weird world where $280M is not considered a lot of money.

orochimaaru• 1 day ago

This is a really weird comparison. The Chan Zuckerberg foundation is nowhere involved with any war. All they’re doing is making money available for research. In which universe is $280m not enough?

lenerdenator3• 1 day ago

When the people running it have a net worth of over $150 billion.

davrosthedalek2• 22 hours ago

The grant size for phase 1 is 750k / 9 month. That is actually quite substantial.

[Despite that, I generally think more money should go to science, all around. But I have COI here.]

brcmthrowaway• 1 day ago

ELI5.

embedding-shape2• 1 day ago

SAM 3 (Segment Anything Model 3) and DINOv3, projects released by Facebook, were used to do science and research.

Petersipoi• 1 day ago

AI model inspects hundreds of thousands of scientific images. A job that previously took an expert roughly a month can now be completed in around 15 minutes.

momojo2• 1 day ago

I'm no fan of Facebook or its social effects but I can't deny the wonderful downstream effect of their open source.

Popular microscopy models like Cellpose[0] have leaned heavily on the cornucopia of open and SOTA power. I have no doubt thousands of biologists have benefitted from the capabilities these models bring. I think it was unthinkable just 5 years ago that a single biologist with just a laptop could do mass-segmentation at this kind of fidelity.

Then there's Napari and it's plugin ecosystem[1] that wouldn't exist without the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Again, I'm not trying to glaze them but as someone in the biotech/microscopy space I can't understate how often I use and benefit from their open source.

[0] https://cellpose.readthedocs.io/en/latest/models.html [1] https://chanzuckerberg.com/rfa/napari-plugin-grants/

DaiPlusPlus4• 1 day ago

but I can't deny the wonderful downstream effect of their open source.

ReactJS has been a very mixed-bag...

righthand• 1 day ago

React is more of a plague than a wonderful downstream effect or mixed bag. It’s essentially cemented Js as the way to build a website even if you don’t need the complexity. It is the leader in brain dead Js evangelism.

locknitpicker4• 1 day ago

ReactJS has been a very mixed-bag...

This is a very confused statement to be made, specially after the last decade where React established itself as the de facto way of writing any and every SPA.

Is it yet another example of "there are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

sailingparrot2• 1 day ago

Meta's open-source approach makes this possible

I'm sorry, was this article drafted in 2024 and never updated?

hgoel3• 1 day ago

The models in question have source and weights available. AFAIK not fully FOSS because the weights require registration to access.

kingstnap• 1 day ago

This sort of random out of date comment is a common LLM writing trope. Though it is true that the segment anything model is open source.

https://github.com/facebookresearch/sam3

They have another with calling A100s modern.

A100 GPUs — the high-performance computing chips that power today's most advanced AI systems.

They might not have written it with AI, but the article has a lot of em dashs and colons and not this but that statements.

ipsum2• 1 day ago

SAM3.1 was released and open sourced March 2026.

But what's the point of correcting you? People will continue to propagate their own lies.

sailingparrot2• 1 day ago

Sure, I just find using OSS grand standing, and trying to educate the audience about the benefits of OSS a bit distasteful after Meta pulled away from OSS for their main flagship models.

kevin_b_er• 21 hours ago

This is a false statement.

Your use of the SAM Materials will not involve or encourage others to reverse engineer, decompile or discover the underlying components of the SAM Materials. Your use of the DINO Materials will not involve or encourage others to reverse engineer, decompile or discover the underlying components of the DINO Materials.

It is not open source, thus the statement is false and a "lie". Nothing here is "open source".

commoner2• 1 day ago

Whenever Meta claims their models are open source, you have to double-check.

SAM License (https://github.com/facebookresearch/sam3/blob/main/LICENSE):

iv. Your use of the SAM Materials will not involve or encourage others to reverse engineer, decompile or discover the underlying components of the SAM Materials.
v. You are not the target of Trade Controls and your use of SAM Materials must comply with Trade Controls. You agree not to use, or permit others to use, SAM Materials for any activities subject to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) or end uses prohibited by Trade Controls, including those related to military or warfare purposes, nuclear industries or applications, espionage, or the development or use of guns or illegal weapons.
b. If you institute litigation or other proceedings against Meta or any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the SAM Materials, outputs or results, or any portion of any of the foregoing, constitutes infringement of intellectual property or other rights owned or licensable by you, then any licenses granted to you under this Agreement shall terminate as of the date such litigation or claim is filed or instituted. You will indemnify and hold harmless Meta from and against any claim by any third party arising out of or related to your use or distribution of the SAM Materials.

The DINOv3 License (https://github.com/facebookresearch/dinov3/blob/main/LICENSE...) is similar but with the model names swapped.

It's always nice when a model's weights are released, but Meta's models are not open source because their weights always come with weird restrictions.

khuey2• 1 day ago

We've seen b before. React was controversially released with a similar clause and ultimately Facebook dropped it and used a standard open source license. Their lawyers really love this idea for some reason.

lenerdenator3• 1 day ago

Do their lawyers love the idea? Hard to say. My guess is, Zuck really likes the idea, so he keeps directing them and their chief counsel to try stuff like this.

It's almost as if having a CEO of a company placed beyond the control of the corporate board is a bad thing.

bmandale• 1 day ago

Was it released with it? Iirc they tried moving to such a license from bsd, which contains no patent grants whatsoever, and hence they thought it was a strict upgrade. The community did not agree so they moved back.

ahmadyan• 23 hours ago

We used to call b the Disney/LEGO clause. Disney was famous for litigating any GenAI product for copyright infringement if it was able to recognize or god-forbid generate any of their IPs. So the lawyer cats would slip that clause into all licenses.

Personally i think it's fair. You get to use this model as long as you don't sue Meta because of the model's weights or outputs.

satvikpendem7• 11 hours ago

Open source is not just open weight, even if weights are released under MIT. The source code to generate that binary weight blob isn't there.

commoner2• 3 hours ago

I agree with you on the distinction. Meta's models are not even open weights, and yet they are claiming that their models are open source.

xnx• 9 hours ago

Google also donated $40 million in tokens https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-sector/accelerat...

Meta's AI models are powering the first wave of Genesis Mission projects

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