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Genesis Mission is the new final frontier
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- The Trump White House unveiled its Genesis Mission Executive order
- They want to build a government AI platform
- It might compete with existing models and will be used to solve issues in from everything from nuclear fission to manufacturing
"What exactly is Genesis? Well, put simply, Genesis is life from lifelessness." That's not a quote from the Trump White House's new Genesis Mission proclama...er...Executive Order. No, that insightful notion comes from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where Genesis is a biome, or biology-filled torpedo, capable of initiating life on a dead planet.
The White House's new Genesis Mission is – in a way – a torpedo full of ideas intended to jump-start the US Government's position in the global AI race and perhaps put us on equal footing with China, which initiated its own New General Artificial Intelligence Plan in 2017 and ever since has been pouring money into its development across infrastructure and private business.
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With the Genesis Mission, which will be run out of the Department of Energy (DoE) but under the oversight of the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Michael Kratsios, President Donald Trump is codifying an effort he began months ago when he started announcing billions in private sector AI company investments.
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Not exactly a new moonshot
Genesis Mission, though, is also different than any of the White House's previous AI initiatives. It's reminiscent in some ways of the early space race and establishment of NASA, and also the 1969 development of ARPANET under the auspices of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The goal of NASA was to get our satellites, and eventually humans, into space and to the moon. ARPANET, which eventually spawned the Internet and our World Wide Web, was concerned with building the first network capable of connecting computers around the US (mostly university computers).
Genesis Mission's stated goal is building "an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets — the world’s largest collection of such datasets, developed over decades of Federal investments — to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs."
If I'm reading that correctly, this is the first US government effort to build an owned and operated AI platform, one with its own infrastructure and models, and that stands apart from what, say, Google's built with Gemini, OpenAI built with ChatGPT, or Elon Musk is building with Grok.
Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inboxContact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsBy submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.More tellingly, Genesis Mission plans to use government data for training. Since US citizens own the government and the government is full of services that serve US citizens, one must assume that much of this training data is ours or, more specifically, about us.
While there are indications that the US Government will work with universities and private companies for some of this, it's clear that the Genesis Mission will be making much of the platform's inner workings on its own. The exec order describes the creation of the American Science and Security Platform as the infrastructure that will include:
- High-performance computing resources
- AI modeling and analysis frameworks
- Computational tools
- Domain-specific foundation models
- Experimental and production tools to enable autonomous and AI-augmented experimentation and manufacturing in high-impact domains
Following this path, our data will be building models in a home-grown, US Government facility, a sort of black box of AI creations – a Genesis that brings inert data to life.
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As for the areas of Genesis Mission AI interest, they include:
- Advanced manufacturing
- Biotechnology
- Critical materials
- Nuclear fission and fusion energy
- Quantum information science
- Semiconductors and microelectronics
None of these categories is surprising, but a government agency building vast AI networks capable of "automating research workflows" on touchy areas like nuclear fission and biotechnology should give some pause.
I'm not saying I do not want AI to solve some of our biggest problems. Certainly, cancer is at the top of my list, as is sustainable energy as it applies to climate change. But the exec order makes zero mention of those two persistent issues. The Genesis Mission is far more concerned with winning the global AI war and advancing the business of AI than it is with solving actual human problems.
Which brings me back to what the Genesis Mission is and what it might create. This is an administration that's siphoned more than a billion dollars from universities engaged in critical health research, but it will spend tax dollars (via the DOE) on this effort. There's nothing in the Genesis Mission that mentions the common good or humanity. In fact, the words "humanity," "humans," "people," "citizens," and "life" are all missing from this approximately 3,400-word document. It's a lifeless construct better suited to an omniscient AI than it is a life-altering, humanity-lifting "mission."
Put simply, it has all the ingredients of Skynet V. 1.
Fun fact about the Wrath of Khan's Genesis torpedo: even though it was designed as a life-germinating technology, it also doubled as a doomsday device because its "life-giving" capabilities could also be used to overwrite civilizations.
The question we have to ask ourselves about this new Genesis Mission is this: will it give us new life and opportunities, or eventually use what it knows about us to overwrite our existence?
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Lance UlanoffSocial Links NavigationEditor At LargeA 38-year industry veteran and award-winning journalist, Lance has covered technology since PCs were the size of suitcases and “on line” meant “waiting.” He’s a former Lifewire Editor-in-Chief, Mashable Editor-in-Chief, and, before that, Editor in Chief of PCMag.com and Senior Vice President of Content for Ziff Davis, Inc. He also wrote a popular, weekly tech column for Medium called The Upgrade.
Lance Ulanoff makes frequent appearances on national, international, and local news programs including Live with Kelly and Mark, the Today Show, Good Morning America, CNBC, CNN, and the BBC.
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