Washington — President Trump on Monday signed an executive order meant to accelerate scientific discovery through the use of artificial intelligence, directing the Energy Department and its national labs to build an integrated AI platform using their existing and future supercomputers.
The goal of what the White House is calling the “Genesis Mission” is to speed the research and scientific discovery process by analyzing massive data sets in the science, engineering, energy and health care spaces from the federal government, university and private sector with supercomputing technology. It’s an AI initiative the White House hopes will result in quicker breakthroughs in areas of research including disease therapies.
Michael Krastios, science adviser to the president, told reporters on a conference call the Genesis mission is “the largest marshaling of federal scientific resources since the Apollo program.”
“By fusing massive federal data sets, advanced supercomputing capabilities, and world-leading scientific facilities, the Genesis mission will use AI to automate experiment design, accelerate simulation and generate protective models for everything from protein folding to fusion plasma dynamics,” Krastios said. “This will shorten discovery timelines from years to days or even hours, empowering scientists to test bolder hypotheses and discover breakthroughs currently unreachable.”
White House officials told reporters on the conference call that they want to bring in AI supercomputing capacity that the private sector is building. The White House said there’s been significant interest from the private sector from companies that include Nvidia and Dell.
