DOE readies multibillion-dollar AI push | Science

DOE readies multibillion-dollar AI push | Science: The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is planning a major initiative to use artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up scientific discoveries. At a meeting here last week, DOE officials said they will likely ask Congress for between $3 billion and $4 billion over 10 years, roughly the amount the agency is spending to build next-generation “exascale” supercomputers.

“That's a good starting point,” says Earl Joseph, CEO of Hyperion Research, a high-performance computing analysis firm in St. Paul that tracks AI research funding. He notes, though, that DOE's planned spending is modest compared with the feverish investment in AI by China and industry.

But DOE has a big asset: torrents of data. The agency funds atom smashers, surveys of the universe, and the sequencing of thousands of genomes. “We generate almost unimaginable amounts of data, petabytes per day,” Chris Fall, who directs DOE's Office of Science, said at the last of four town halls DOE has held here to build support for the AI initiative. Algorithms trained with these data could help discover new materials or spot signs of new physics. “It's going to impact everything we do,” Fall says.

DOE is joining a global rush to fund A