US Department of Energy (DOE) undersecretary for science Darío Gil has provided more details on the agency’s recently unveiled Genesis Mission, declaring the project’s goal to make “all knowledge computable” in order to drive advancements in AI and quantum computing.

Unveiled just before the Thanksgiving holiday, the Genesis Mission will bring together DOE labs along with private players like Nvidia, OpenAI, and Cisco to turn vast troves of historical science data into high-fidelity training data for AI.

The project was given the moniker of Manhattan Project 2.0, and in a letter “to the community,” undersecretary Gil kept up the grandiose guise, claiming it would double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade.

“We will strengthen national security, secure energy dominance, and multiply the return on taxpayer investment into research and development, thereby furthering America’s global technological and strategic leadership,” Gil wrote.

In his outline for the Genesis Mission, the undersecretary for science claimed that, once realized, it would be “the most complex and powerful scientific instrument ever built.”

“Leveraging the Genesis platform, along with the broad and deep domain expertise that exists across the labs and our industry and university partners, we will create the world’s largest and highest-quality scientific data sets to train the next generation of AI systems,” said the former IBM director of research.

“The platform build will be informed and driven by a portfolio of scientific and engineering grand challenges that will reflect the full scope of the missions of the department, spanning discovery science, energy innovation, and national security.”

Despite the labeling, the Executive Order that birthed the Genesis Mission specifies the project should leverage “resources available through industry partners.” It also failed to explicitly state whether any new financial contracts will be available, with the order repeatedly stating that all activities are “subject to available appropriations.”

While the matter of funding for Genesis was absent from his letter, Gil wrote that it will “require a partnership model unprecedented in scope to mobilize the entire Science and Technology capacity of the nation.”

“The original Manhattan Project was executed through Federal government direction alone and in secrecy … Today, multiple private-sector-led AI supercomputers are being built with price tags in the tens of billions of dollars. The aggregate computing and data center investments planned for the coming five years exceed $2 trillion in the U.S. alone.”

“We must leverage these investments for the success of our mission,” Gil wrote. “Expect a lot of energy and creativity as we pursue partnerships across the Department. It is our only path to success.

Shortly after the Genesis Mission was officially launched, one of the CEOs taking part in the project sat down with SDxCentral to make sense of it.

Cornelis Network’s chief, Lisa Spelman, said the initial launch was to give the public “an early look” and that the project isn’t yet at a stage where contracts could be made available.

“As far as I know, they weren't really announcing at the time investment amounts, and I think that will start to come through as the U.S. government goes through appropriations,” Spelman told SDxCentral.

She described the work of the Genesis Mission as an “industry-plus-government type of effort to define the best solutions for the variety of different use cases and workloads.”

“This is not something where all the work has been done, and then it's being announced as a finalized product … This is an undertaking and a vision that requires a lot of us in the industry to come together and put our best foot forward.”