(Bloomberg) — President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday establishing the “Genesis Mission,” a federal effort to boost innovation using artificial intelligence — the latest step by the administration to promote AI technology and its adoption.
The effort aims to better coordinate research done by agencies across the government and more effectively integrate AI tools to achieve more scientific breakthroughs, according to Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who spoke to reporters on the order ahead of Trump’s signature.
The mission will harness the computing resources of the Department of Energy’s national labs to tap federal datasets and enable more experiments utilizing AI, Kratsios added, predicting the effort would help shorten the timelines for scientific discoveries.
Partnerships with private-sector companies, including Nvidia Corp., Dell Technologies Inc., HPE and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., will boost supercomputing resources at the labs, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details on the order. The official cited recent announcements from those companies as a model for potential new ones.
Officials on Monday said the push would accelerate scientific discoveries in materials engineering, health sciences and energy. And they sought to cast the innovation gains as critical to helping bolster production and lower prices, another key priority for the administration as it seeks to address voter concerns about living costs.
“With the power of AI, America is on the brink of a scientific revolution,” Kratsios said Monday.
Energy Costs
The massive computing resources needed for AI’s development and use, though, rely on energy-hungry data centers, which has spurred worries that the adoption of the technology will only increase strains on the US electric grid.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Monday said the Genesis initiative would help counter rising energy costs, saying one of its “ultimate goals” in the energy space is to “bring more energy on, make our electricity grid more efficient and reverse price rises that have infuriated American citizens.”
“We’re going to stop the rise of price of energy. First, it’ll plateau, and ultimately will push downward pressure on the prices of electricity,” Wright said.
The initiative was previewed earlier in November by Department of Energy Chief of Staff Carl Coe, who cast it as an effort to signal that the Trump administration sees the race to develop AI technology as just as important as the space race and the World War II-era Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb.
Kratsios on Monday called it the “largest marshaling of federal scientific resources since the Apollo program” — the US mission to send humans to the moon and bring them back to Earth safely.
Trump has frequently hailed the promise of AI and made its development a top priority for his administration, pushing policies he says are critical to ensuring the US wins a race with China and others to advance the technology. Through a host of executive orders, Trump has moved to ease regulatory burdens to make it easier for companies to build AI infrastructure and power data centers and for allies to obtain key hardware and software.
He’s also pushed to block state-level regulation in the US, arguing for a federal standard. The president is preparing an executive order that would allow the Department of Justice to sue states over artificial intelligence regulations it deems unconstitutional.
