The US Department of Energy and two dozen AI labs and companies this week announced collaborations aimed at boosting the use of artificial intelligence in scientific research.
This week's news focused mostly on organizations in the AI and computing industries, with the goal of building a platform for what the Trump administration has dubbed the "Genesis Mission." More announcements are expected to come involving universities, nonprofits and research organizations.
Dario Gil, DOE's undersecretary for science and director of the Genesis Mission, says the goal is to create a platform for AI-enhanced scientific research at the department's national laboratories and across the tech industry, academia and more.
"We are committed to expanding this ecosystem and truly making it into a collaborative endeavor from all the institutions that make scientific and technological progress in America," Gil told CNET in an interview Friday.
What are companies committing for scientific research?
Tech companies that announced their involvement this week include some of the biggest names in AI -- OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind -- as well as hardware companies like Nvidia and Intel and data center providers like Oracle CoreWeave and Amazon Web Services.
These companies pledged a variety of resources for the project. In a blog post, OpenAI said the memorandum of understanding it signed with the DOE would provide a clear way to ensure the company and DOE's labs can work together. OpenAI said it's already working with some labs to put frontier AI models on supercomputers to help researchers.
Google DeepMind said it would provide its frontier scientific AI models and tools for scientists at all 17 national laboratories. Early next year, the company will provide early access to tools like AlphaEvolve, a Gemini-powered coding agent that could be used in areas like material science and drug discovery; AlphaGenome, a model for genetic research; and WeatherNext, a set of weather forecasting models.
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"The challenges facing our world -- from energy to disease to security -- demand unprecedented scientific innovation," Google DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli and Tom Lue wrote in a blog post. "By combining human ingenuity with advanced AI capabilities, we believe we can help America's scientists achieve discoveries that would have seemed impossible just years ago."
CoreWeave said it would make its AI cloud infrastructure available for scientific research efforts. "CoreWeave is proud to provide a secure, high performance platform that ensures advanced AI workloads run with unmatched speed and reliability, empowering researchers to focus on the breakthroughs that will shape our future," CEO Michael Intrator said in a statement.
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What does this mean for science?
This push to accelerate scientific discovery comes after the Trump administration spent much of the year cutting or limiting government funding for scientific research, particularly research into issues like climate change that don't align with administration priorities. Earlier this week, the administration announced plans to break up the National Center for Atmospheric Research, with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought calling it "one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country" in a post on X.
Gil said the Genesis Mission will include research into priorities like quantum computing and energy -- both things that will help with the growing AI boom -- but also with basic scientific discovery, and that partners will include those in academia.
The creation of an AI-powered platform for research across sectors will be huge for scientific advancement, Gil said. AI models allow scientists to better understand and model complex systems, to generate hypotheses and to attempt preliminary experiments based on those models.
"We're taking super seriously that this is the new scientific instrument for our age," he said. "Just like astronomy got revolutionized with telescopes… I think these AI and quantum systems and [high-performance computing] are the new telescopes of our time."
