Donald Trump’s new “Genesis Mission” initiative promises to use artificial intelligence to reinvent how science is done, in a bid to move the dial on the hardest challenges in areas like robotics, biotech and nuclear fusion.
It imagines a system in which AI designs experiments, executes them, learns from the results and continually proposes new lines of inquiry. The hope is that this will unlock dramatically higher productivity in federally funded research.
This vision fits a wider international trend, including in the UK: governments are investing heavily in AI for science, citing successes such as DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures, and is now woven into many areas of biology and drug discovery.
