Betting on America: Winning the Global Tech Race Can AI Accelerate Scientific Discovery? Featuring Under Secretary Darío Gil
Apr 8, 2026
Darío Gil, Under Secretary for Science and Innovation and former IBM research leader, discusses the DOE’s Genesis Mission. He breaks down the AI-driven platform that pairs AI, supercomputing and quantum tech. Topics include data and instruments like AlphaFold, public-private-philanthropic consortiums, workforce retraining, agile governance, research security, and international collaboration.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Genesis Treats AI As A Science Reorganization
- The Genesis mission treats the current AI and computing shift as a transformational opportunity to reorganize how the U.S. does science.
- It combines AI, high-performance GPUs, and quantum computing into an integrated platform plus an agentic AI framework to accelerate end-to-end scientific workflows.
AI Emulates Expensive Simulations 10,000x Faster
- Training neural nets on outputs of expensive physics simulations can reproduce simulation accuracy at vastly higher speed.
- Gil says models can match simulation fidelity but run 10,000x faster, enabling iterative design cycles for problems like fusion plasma control.
Protein Data Bank Fueled AlphaFold Explosion
- Darío Gil used the Brookhaven protein data bank story to show how curated scientific data enabled AlphaFold's leap.
- 200,000 experimentally-determined protein structures accumulated over 50 years enabled AlphaFold to scale to ~200 million predictions in two years.