I had a chance to interview Darío Gil about his big new project combining AI, quantum and high-performance computing — the Genesis Mission — and it was incredibly interesting. Darío is one of the most impressive leaders in the quantum industry who previously ran IBM’s research lab and today is the Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy overseeing all 17 national research labs. The Genesis Mission is a new federal initiative that aims to use artificial intelligence and supercomputing to radically accelerate scientific discovery and technological innovation in the United States — to effectively create a “national AI engine” for research. It will develop an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows and even conduct experiments. Periodically government-sponsored research produces something extraordinary that has an immense impact on the private sector. I think the Genesis Mission has the opportunity to achieve this.
The Art of Marketcrafting
I had a chance to moderate a great discussion with Chris Hughes, the economist and cofounder of Facebook, about his new book Marketcrafters: The 100-Year Struggle to Shape the American Economy, along with Eddie Fishman and Jessica Brandt. The book examines attempts by both sides of the political aisle to shape or manage markets for political or social ends across many industries – finance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, aviation, and others. We looked at examples where these efforts had worked well (e.g. the Federal Reserve), where they hadn’t (e.g. government involvement in healthcare) and what lessons could be drawn from history (e.g. the importance of institutional accountability and responsiveness to ever-changing markets). We reviewed recent attempts to shape technology markets (AI, semiconductors) to help achieve geopolitical goals and shared perspectives on how likely they were to be successful. You can listen to the whole discussion here.
Collaborative Intelligence
Much of the early public discussion about AI focused on what AI could do better than humans and where it would replace human labor. The same thing happened with the emergence of computers in the 1960’s, personal computers in the 1970’s and the internet in the 1990’s. This line of thinking is a natural human response to new technologies perceived as a threat, but it misses the far more important point that the big breakthroughs in productivity and intelligence come from human-AI, human-internet and human-computer teaming.
In this podcast discussion with Gautam Mukunda and Shawn Bice, we had a chance to dig into what the collaborative human-AI intelligence of the future will look like, how AI will change human decision-making and how it will impact employment, science and technology innovation. You can listen to the discussion here.
Maintaining U.S. Leadership in Science and Technology
One of the most interesting things I’ve worked on this past year is a project at the Council on Foreign Relations examining the risk and consequences of the U.S. losing part of its science and technology leadership, principally to China.
We had a phenomenal group of people working on our Task Force from the technology, government and academic communities, including Admiral William McRaven, James Manyika, Reid Hoffman, DJ Patil, Eric Schmidt, Raj Shah, Doug Beck and Regina Dugan.
Today our final report was published – you can download it here. For a 2-minute overview, here’s an article I wrote with Congressman Jim Himes that highlights the report’s major ideas and recommendations.