Trump aims to boost AI innovation and build platform to harness government data
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
US President Donald Trump has prioritised winning the AI race against China.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Follow topic:
WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump on Nov 24 signed an executive order to launch a government-wide effort to build an integrated artificial intelligence (AI) platform to harness federal scientific datasets to train next-generation technologies.
The effort, dubbed the Genesis Mission, aims to transform scientific research and speed up scientific discoveries by using massive government scientific datasets “to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows and accelerate scientific breakthroughs”.
Mr Trump directed the Department of Energy (DOE) and US National Laboratories “to unite America’s brightest minds, most powerful computers and vast scientific data into one cooperative system for research”.
DOE will create a closed-loop AI experimentation platform integrating US supercomputers and datasets to generate foundation models and power robotic laboratories.
Mr Michael Kratsios, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the effort aims to unlock federal datasets and “massively accelerate the rate of scientific breakthrough”.
He said the Genesis Mission aims to use AI to “automate experiment design, accelerate simulation and generate predictive models for everything from protein folding to fusion plasma dynamics. This will shorten discovery timelines from years to days or even hours”.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright noted the massive private-sector investment in AI but said the government wanted to pivot those efforts to “focus on scientific discovery (and) engineering advancements, and to do that, you need the datasets that are contained across our national labs”.
The order pays particular attention to US national, economic and health security, including biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear fission and fusion energy, space exploration, quantum information science, semiconductors and microelectronics.
Mr Trump has prioritised winning the AI race against China.
Soon after taking office in January, he ordered his administration to produce an AI Action Plan that would make “America the world capital in artificial intelligence” and reduce regulatory barriers to its rapid expansion.
He also rescinded an AI safety executive order signed by his predecessor Joe Biden. REUTERS
