Federal AI Enters a ‘Storming Phase’ Under the Genesis Mission

Federal leaders are in what they describe as the “storming phase” as they work to stand up the infrastructure and autonomous capabilities needed to rapidly test, validate and scale AI research following the launch of the Trump administration’s Genesis Mission in November.

Led by the Energy Department and its 17 national labs, the Genesis Mission aims to create a national discovery platform that connects supercomputers, AI systems and quantum technologies into an integrated infrastructure.

“Genesis is really focused on increasing the speed of that scientific loop and reducing the time for innovation … connecting data, connecting compute and that decision-making process,” said Scott Godwin, director of the Center for Continuum Computing at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), at GovCIO Media & Research’s AI Summit in Tysons, Virginia, last week.

PNNL operates more than 500 environments with edge compute, each run by different people, processes and classifications, Godwin said. The fragmentation creates complexity for researchers and forces work into silos.

“The Genesis Mission is taking it to national scale,” he said. “How do we reduce that complexity across organizations and national labs to make it work effectively?”

Federal leaders said they are prioritizing flexible, non-bespoke approaches and deepening industry partnerships to meet the Genesis directive.

“Because the space is moving so rapidly, we’re not trying to make a single investment and hope it supports everyone,” said Nick Weber, acting director of the Office of Scientific Computing Services at the National Institutes of Health’s Center for Information Technology. “We’re supporting cloud, supporting on-prem high-performance computing and using products being rolled out across the department. We’re trying to take a broad approach.”

PNNL is also investing in what it calls “assured autonomy” to develop reliable, safe and trustworthy autonomous systems. As part of that effort, the lab is standing up a team of autonomous experimentation experts that Godwin referred to as the “pit crew.”

“The Genesis Mission is pushing us toward AI at scale in the scientific domain,” Godwin said. “The opportunity is huge, but the question is how you move fast without compromising trust.”

“If we’re going to move from science to impact at scale, from decades to days, you not only need autonomous capability — it has to be assured,” he added. “That’s a major focus for us as we build the infrastructure and processes around it.”

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is home to the Digital Innovation Center for Excellence (DICE), which examines how to bring innovation to the energy industry and address the complexities of designing autonomous systems, said Maria Coelho, a model-based systems engineering scientist at the lab.

A few years ago, the frontier for Coelho’s team was model-based systems engineering, an approach that centralizes information across disciplines to enable a more holistic, model-driven design process.

“With the rise of AI, we’ve started exploring autonomous design, where AI is brought into the loop early to generate the first iteration of the design model — the spatial model of what the infrastructure could look like,” Coelho said. “The success of a complex project like Genesis will require combining those proven techniques with AI to take a holistic approach and accelerate timelines.”