Inside the White House meeting on its AI Genesis Mission

A total of 24 private sector companies have signed on to work in tandem with the Department of Energy to advance its artificial intelligence-advancing Genesis Mission, following a meeting on Thursday morning at the White House with Energy and industry leaders. 

The participating companies will partner with national laboratories — which are overseen by Energy — to form a new American Science and Security Platform, an initiative that aims to harness new AI systems solely for scientific advancement. 

Major tech players are included in the initiative, such as AMD, Anthropic, xAI, AWS, OpenAI, Oracle, Dell, IBM and Microsoft. Smaller companies with a narrower focus on developing AI tools for research in domains like materials science, chemistry and engineering were also included.

Joseph Krause, the CEO of one of these companies, Radical AI, told Nextgov/FCW that Thursday’s meeting featured a “positive mentality” in the room between public and private sector leaders.

“Everyone's focused on a common goal of: How do we truly execute against what the Genesis Mission is calling for? What does that look like? How is public-private partnership going to be a big piece of that?” Krause said. 

He added that while Genesis and its platform will focus on the top 20 scientific challenges outlined by Energy alongside the Genesis Mission — which include biotechnology, critical minerals supply and nuclear fusion and fission — longevity is top of mind for administration officials.

Krause said the goal is to leverage AI to change science, with a focus on technical details of the platform, including where other emerging technologies like quantum computing come into play. 

“I would really highlight … the focus on partnership, not just with the government, but with each other,” Krause said. “There are quite a few competitors in the room of each other on paper and what their real business lines are. But that's not why we were there today. Why we were there today was to think about: How can we do this for the American people? How can we actually deliver a result, at least from industry side, on actually pushing scientific progress forward?”

Initial projects and the areas Genesis will tackle first were not discussed, according to Krause. Some participants, like AWS, have been working on specific projects like nuclear energy innovation with Idaho National Laboratory through advanced cloud infrastructure deployment. 

OpenAI also spotlighted its previous work at the national lab level following the meeting, specifically on deploying their frontier models to the coalition of National Nuclear Security Administration labs to run on their supercomputing infrastructure. 

Krause said that the diversity in the specialties of each individual company reflects the Genesis Mission’s larger approach to overhauling how emerging technologies are used in the scientific process. 

“The task ahead … requires a multitude of partners across the stack,” he said. “There is compute, there is infrastructure, there is software, there is automation, there is robotics, there is science –– like materials, biology and chemistry –– understanding of true scientific phenomena. And then all of that needs to kind of get put together and then pushed forward in a way.”