Energy Dept. unveils AI roadmap for science, energy, and national security
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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on July 16 released a roadmap for its initiative to solidify U.S. leadership in safe and trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) systems for scientific discovery, energy research, and national security.
The roadmap for the DOE’s Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science, Security, and Technology (FASST) initiative, which was announced in May, aims to help harness AI for the public good, the department said.
“Certain strategic areas of the US government’s artificial intelligence capabilities currently lag industry while foreign adversaries are investing in AI at scale,” according to a FASST summary. “If U.S. government leadership is not rapidly established in this sector, the nation risks falling behind in the development of safe and trustworthy AI for national security, energy, and scientific discovery, and thereby compromising our ability to address pressing national and global challenges.”
The roadmap will help guide the U.S. government as capabilities for AI are developed through FASST, DOE, and its 17 national laboratories in collaboration with academic and industry partners.
“Artificial intelligence is an innovative technology that can help unleash breakthroughs in energy technologies and enhance our national security,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. “FASST builds on DOE’s role as the nation’s steward of advanced supercomputing and research infrastructure across our 17 national labs to provide a national capability in AI and enable technological breakthroughs for decades to come.”
DOE’s roadmap for FASST includes the key DOE infrastructure it leverages, the assets it will deliver for the national interest, and its organizing framework for providing a national AI capability.
FASST will transform the vast repositories of scientific data produced at DOE user facilities to be AI-ready and build the next-generation of energy efficient AI supercomputers, DOE says, in turn, allowing U.S. researchers to develop trustworthy foundation AI models to realize breakthroughs in a variety of scientific and energy applications, including for new battery materials, smart grid infrastructure, or fusion, among others.
These capabilities also will be leveraged to provide insight into the properties of AI systems at scale, said DOE.