Putting AI for Science and Engineering Into Overdrive at Genesis Mission Summit

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The integration of AI into scientific and engineering workflows will kickstart an unprecedented period of progress, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at today’s inaugural Genesis Mission Summit in Washington, D.C.
“We will see a…rapid transformation of human understanding, of nature, of physics, of how to harness beneficial technologies for humans,” Wright told about 650 government officials, scientists, media types, and others who piled into the Capital Hilton a few blocks from the White House today. “The next 10 years will be the most revolutionary 10 years in the scientific and energy worlds in human history.”
The Department of Energy is seeding that future scientific progress through Genesis Mission, the moonshot-style program unveiled nearly eight months ago to harness emerging AI technologies. The DOE unveiled the first batch of awards today, primarily for phase one Genesis Mission projects, in which the government is committing to spend about $250 million across 278 projects led by DOE National Labs, universities, private companies, and non-profit organizations. There was one phase two award announced, while the bulk of the phase two awards are expected to be announced in September.
Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the Genesis Mission is on part with the great American endeavors of the past century.
“Two hundred fifty years after our nation’s first great adventure and innovation, 87 years after the Manhattan Project and 65 years after the Apollo program, we are once again mobilizing a grand vision and national effort for the achievement of our highest ambitions,” Kratsios said at the Genesis Mission Summit. “When President Kennedy declared that Americans would set foot on the moon, he told the world that such a lofty goal would serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Now, at the dawn of artificial intelligence, with the Genesis Mission, we are set not just one goal, but many. Now we choose not to just have one high achievement, but many grand challenges.”
The DOE originally unveiled 26 lighthouse challenges in February to help guide scientists and engineers as part of Genesis Mission, largely illuminated by the Energy Department’s priorities. As the Genesis Mission has expanded to 20 federal agencies, the DOE has added new challenges focused on space, human health, defense, and veterans health, bringing the total number of challenges to 33, said Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil.
“We will keep refining and expanding as appropriate,” Gil said, “but these now reflect the full strength of these 20 different agencies and departments coming together.”
If all goes as planned, the Genesis Mission will lead to an Internet of science that connects government, academia, and industry together, Gil said. This could help to realize a dream of scientists for the past 300 years, where data and scientific knowledge can be encoded and shared in a manner that uplifts everyone connected to it, he said.
“In the original Internet, the end nodes of the computing of the devices were computers, and the orchestration was a TCP/IP protocol,” he said. “In the modern world of Internet of science, the end nodes are both computers and scientific instruments, particle accelerators and telescopes and microscopes, and additive manufacturing, and the orchestration is enabled by this agentic capability that can pass through complex scientific understanding of workflows and orchestration.”
Today’s Genesis Mission Summit provided a glimpse into the types of progress that Gil, Wright, and Kratsios are looking to drive. For instance, Terrence Chao, a math professor at UCLA, talked about how AI is helping to find all types of new solutions to math problems that stood for decades. AI is particularly useful for verification of math problems, which was a very time-consuming, manual job before.
“It’s transforming a field very unevenly, but ultimately in a very promising way,” Chao said, estimating that AI has accelerated mathematics by 100 fold. “For centuries, we were in an era where we were always short on proofs.” But today, we’re in an era where we more proofs than problems.”
Laurent Chapon, the associate lab director for photon sciences at Argonne National Lab, told the Genesis Mission Summit audience that AI is transforming scientists’ relationship with experimental data.
The lab uses X-rays and other machines to scan items, such as semiconductor, for errors. The data flowing from these experiments every year is the equivalent of 150 million movies. Analyzing that data is was time-consuming task that could take weeks. But thanks to AI, that analysis can now be conducted in a few minutes to a few hours.
“As we scan the X-ray through the specimen, the AI model is able in real time to reconstruct the data, something that was impossible only a few months ago,” Chapon said. “So you go from something that takes hours to something that takes essentially real time. This is done at 200 images per second. So there’s at least a factor 100 in speedup, and it impacts everything we do.”
Hendrik Hamann, the chief AI scientist for innovation, science and security at Brookhaven National Laboratory, described how AI is helping to transform the electrical grid.
“Unlike language foundation models, which are trained on text, our models are trained on the language of the grid voltage,” he said. “The model learns how to predict the physics of the grid, enabling us to evaluate billions of scenarios not only rapidly, but also accurately and robustly.”
AI is often considered to be a burden on the grid. But in fact, AI can help make the grid stronger. That includes with conducting studies to integrate new data centers into the grid. “Without AI, for example, data center interconnection simulation studies take months, sometimes years. Now we can do it literally in minutes,” Hamann said.
Siva Rajamanickam, a distinguished member of technical staff at Sandia National Laboratory, told the Genesis Mission Summit audience about how his team is using AI to advanced manufacturing.
His team built an agent-driven workflow that generates designs for a rocket and its payload, based on set of objectives and constraints. The agent explores the search space and comes up with a series of 16 designs. The humans then pick the best one to build.
“There is this notion that if you have a complex problem like this, you have to choose two of three: better, faster or cheaper,” Rajamanickam said. “With a technology like AI…you can go for better, faster and cheaper.”
The potential benefits of using AI to drive science and engineering are so massive that they cannot be ignored, Gil said. There have been a few times in the history of the United States where everyone comes together to do something that’s much bigger than ourselves. This is one of those times, he said.
“I am not arguing that this is the only national effort that we should do in science and technology. Far from it,” the Genesis Mission director said. “But if we cannot agree on this one–that this computing revolution is transforming the practice of science and engineering–what is so obvious that we’re all going to agree on as the second and the third and the fourth? Let’s demonstrate the potential where we see plenty of evidence that this is transforming every single field. And this is a moment also for us to come together, to work across sectors, to work collaboratively and realize this premise. And once we learn how to do this again, that we can have a decentralized approach but moments of unity and moments of working and doing really ambitious things together, we will learn that we can do a second and a third and a fourth and a fifth at a scale that we could never do before.”

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