President Trump signed an executive order Monday aimed at boosting AI research and development, with an eye toward reducing Americans' spiraling energy costs.
Why it matters: The Trump administration seeks to ensure that government stays out of the way on AI regulation while actively supporting private-sector innovation.
- At the same time, administration officials are eager to address consumer complaints that are mounting over energy bills, job displacement and other economic worries.
Driving the news: The "Genesis Mission" seeks to encourage government information sharing with industry, academia and other scientific institutions.
- Under the order, the Department of Energy will build a platform with AI capabilities for scientists and engineers to use in their work.
- It would also create a portfolio of scientific and engineering challenges around energy and national security for Genesis Mission participants to pursue.
- Other departments and agencies will be able to tackle their own challenges — such as around drug discovery — through the executive order.
The big picture: Though they didn't give any cost estimates, administration officials portrayed the effort as the largest marshaling of federal scientific resources since the Apollo space program in the 1960s.
- "The Genesis Mission will use AI to automate experiment, design, [and] accelerate simulations and generate predictive models for everything from protein folding to fusion plasma dynamics," Michael Kratsios, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told reporters.
The intrigue: Huge data centers for training and using AI models are among the drivers of rising power demand — and rising electricity bills.
- Energy costs were front and center in the recent New Jersey and Virginia governors' races that Democrats won easily.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who touted his agency's national labs' role in the project, argued that AI can help bring down costs.
- "The ultimate goal of this is to make the lives better for American citizens," including creating job opportunities, he said at a press briefing.
- "In the energy space, it's to bring more energy on, make our electricity grid more efficient and reverse price rises that have infuriated American citizens."
What we're watching: The Trump administration expects more computing partnerships to come out of this project, noting that it has already announced agreements with giants including Nvidia, Dell and others.
What's next: White House officials contend that the Genesis Mission will usher in major scientific advances.
- "This will shorten discovery timelines from years to days or even hours," enabling scientists to test hypotheses and make currently unreachable breakthroughs, Kratsios said.
