The Trump administration announced on July 22 it will invest $5 billion toward using artificial intelligence (AI) to address critical scientific questions across health, energy, U.S. infrastructure, and other disciplines.
More than 15 federal agencies will use AI to investigate the root causes of chronic diseases, develop treatments for pediatric cancer, expedite the discovery of prescription drugs, and enhance U.S. energy infrastructure, among other related tasks, according to a White House news release.
The agencies include the Departments of Energy, Transportation, Defense, Interior, and Health and Human Services.
Michael Kratsios, chief technology adviser to President Donald Trump, told Reuters in an interview that the Department of Energy will give scientists access to the agency’s supercomputers, datasets, and AI, as well as the hardware required to conduct the algorithm-based experiments.
“The White House is helping bring together all of the different agencies that work on different domains to make them part of this larger effort on AI for science,” Kratsios said.
On Tuesday, the White House released a report authored by Kratsios that says the administration is going to “prioritize individual scientist[s] over legacy institutions.”
“Federal funding agencies should support a broader range of performers, including a new generation of mission-driven research organizations, to expand our scientific horizons. And these agencies should organize themselves around the interdisciplinary frontiers of science today, rather than the academic silos of the last century,” the report states.
The report goes on to recommend overhauling how the federal government issues research grants, advocating for “more flexible types of grants, including fast-track grants, long-horizon grants, and new mechanisms that allow reviewers to champion radically unconventional proposals.”
These efforts would likely give the administration more control over how the grant money is used.
“While repeating the mantra that science must be ‘independent’ of politics, parts of academia have become highly dependent on government funding … federal support for science must be politically accountable. Accountability does not mean dictating how a research agenda is to be executed, nor turning away from the basic research that has long been the wellspring of American prosperity,” the report says.
Efforts by Trump to apply more control over the use and allocation of federal research money have been met with lawsuits. In January, a federal appeals panel ruled that the Trump administration cannot carry out large cuts to National Institutes of Health funding given to universities that conduct medical and scientific research.
The AI-driven research and science effort, which the administration has called its Genesis Mission, has already awarded 278 projects, including 168 led by universities, 87 led by the Energy Department and National Nuclear Security Administration, 19 carried out by the private sector, and four by nonprofits.
“The 278 projects selected today represent the very best of our nation’s scientific enterprise. The remarkable number of high-quality proposals we received demonstrates that America’s innovation pipeline is strong, and it points to even greater opportunities for future investment and continued expansion of the Genesis Mission portfolio,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement.
Microsoft said on Wednesday that it will commit $40 million in AI computation credits over three years to “power the large-scale AI and scientific workloads at the heart” of the Energy Department’s Genesis mission.
“This gives researchers room to train, simulate, and iterate at a scale that matches their ambition,” the company said in a statement.
Microsoft said it will also contribute $20 million in services related to “engineering, architecture, deployment, adoption, and acceleration support to turn cloud and AI capacity into operational scientific outcomes.”
