The Department of Energy selected its inaugural cohort of 278 projects for the Genesis Mission, the agency announced Wednesday, an effort to supercharge the U.S. scientific research and discovery apparatus with the help of advanced artificial intelligence.
The selected projects come from a variety of sources: 168 are based at universities; 87 come from the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration’s national laboratories; 19 come from private sector companies; and 4 come from nonprofit organizations.
Darío Gil, the undersecretary for science at Energy, told reporters last week that the programs were selected based on a “science-first strategy.”
“We received over 5,000 proposals, the largest response rate in the history of the department for any specific program,” Gil said.
Each awardee project was selected in a two-step process, he explained. The first step evaluated the relevance of the science in the proposal, referencing the 26 research priorities Energy published in February. The second step examined how AI could be leveraged to further accelerate the research outlined in each proposal.
Private sector partnerships are key to Genesis. Awardees will be granted access to the program’s research environment, which includes AI agent frameworks, advanced AI models and software from industry partners, and high-performance computing resources across Energy’s National Laboratories and partner facilities.
Among the selected projects, four are based in research laboratories, including the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and Idaho National Laboratory. Each does work in disciplines like accelerating nuclear energy permitting and strengthening biosecurity.
Gil said that the program secured more than $500 million in financial contributions from Genesis Mission consortium members, which include compute and semiconductor routes access, tokens and other software. Microsoft, for example, dedicated $40 million in Azure and AI computing credits and $20 million in solution engineering services to Energy and the national labs.
“Through the Genesis Mission, Microsoft is committing to work as part of America’s research enterprise by providing hyperscale compute, advanced models, emerging quantum capabilities, and dedicated expertise that run alongside the labs’ own world-leading systems,” Microsoft U.S. Public Sector Industries President Chris Barry said in a press release.
Gil said that the Genesis Mission aims to advance U.S. scientific research enterprise policy goals through enhanced collaboration between academia, the government and the private sector.
“What we’re saying is that: look, the big pivot is applying AI for science and engineering, to take it seriously, and we should aim to transform and have an impact in as many fields of science as humanly possible,” Gil said during a Special Competitive Studies Project event on Tuesday.
