WASHINGTON, July 16, 2024 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today is announcing its roadmap for the Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science, Security, and Technology (FASST) initiative to help harness AI for the public good. The U.S. government must develop capabilities for this key technology, and through FASST, DOE and its 17 national laboratories aims to build the world’s most powerful integrated scientific AI systems for science, energy, and national security, 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 M. 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 today is releasing its roadmap for FASST: 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 highly energy efficient AI supercomputers.
This national AI capability will allow U.S. researchers, including the 40,000 scientists at the national labs, to develop trustworthy foundation AI models to realize breakthroughs in a variety of scientific and energy applications. From discovering new battery materials, to deploying smart grid infrastructure, to even realizing breakthroughs in fusion, AI can help accelerate scientific discoveries and enable new, affordable, clean energy technologies. These capabilities will also be leveraged to provide insight into properties of AI systems at scale and promote safety, security, trustworthiness, and privacy.
DOE has already demonstrated early successes with AI for scientific breakthroughs through the national laboratories.
FASST intends to build off these early successes and the history of successful public private partnerships at DOE to provide a national AI capability to meet the nation’s national security, energy security, and scientific discovery mission needs.
Learn more about how DOE plans to advance AI innovation through FASST here.
Source: DOE
