Trump Signs AI Executive Order. What to Know About ‘Genesis Mission.’

President Donald Trump speaking to the press on Saturday. (Alex Wroblewski / AFP / Getty Images)

Key Points

• President Trump signed an executive order for the Genesis Mission, an AI platform to accelerate scientific discovery.
• The Genesis Mission aims to leverage government and university scientific datasets to build AI models for various problems.
• The initiative, described as the largest marshaling of federal scientific resources since Apollo, will require significant computing power.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday that directs the National Laboratories to build an artificial-intelligence platform to accelerate scientific and engineering discovery.

Dubbed the Genesis Mission, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios called it “the largest marshaling of federal scientific resources since the Apollo program.”

The order described Genesis as “a dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century.”

The Genesis Mission looks to leverage the large scientific datasets scattered throughout government agencies and universities and use them to build AI models that can more rapidly solve the thorniest problems in medicine, energy, and national security, the last being the primary mission of the National Labs. Kratsios claimed that the new initiative will “shorten discovery timelines from years to days or even hours.”

The biggest expense will be getting enough computing power to create and run these new scientific AI models. The National Labs are already home to massive supercomputers, including the three most powerful, according to the TOP500 list of the world’s supercomputers, released every six months by top500.org. Earlier this year, the Department of Energy, which runs the Labs, announced the building of several new supercomputers in concert with Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Dell Technologies , and Oracle in “public-private” partnerships.

The DOE hasn’t provided details as to how this will work in practice or where the federal government’s contribution will come from. At some point, Congress will likely have to allocate funding for the program.

The administration has indicated that we should expect more of these partnerships to be announced soon, and it has hinted that major cloud-computing providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, may be involved.

The Genesis Mission’s focus on basic research stands in direct opposition to the large cuts in scientific funding that the administration is attempting to implement. The White House may believe that AI can accelerate science at a lower cost.

Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com