U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative
The U.S. Department of Energy has announced the Genesis Open Models Initiative, a new effort to develop and share open-source AI models for scientific research. The initiative, hosted at Argonne National Laboratory, aims to accelerate discoveries in energy, climate, and other critical areas by providing researchers with transparent, accessible models. The project emphasizes collaboration and reproducibility, marking a significant step in the government's commitment to open science.
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- firasd
Just realized that there are basically no American open models right now ever since the Llama series was abandoned. Basically Gemma and GPT-OSS I guess?
Ah but Mira Murati's new Inkling is Apache 2.0
But it makes sense that if you're a university researcher you are thinking about what's a model that will be open weight and developed over the long term and doesn't raise 'Chyna' concerns in Washington DC
- lithobraking
I'm interested to see where they want to land performance-wise (i.e. which point they choose on the scaling curve) and the niche they want to carve. They have a decent ways to scale beyond trinity large, in paticular on posttrain/RL before they are competitive with open-weights, especially internationally.
Deepseek is explicitly banned [1] at LLNL and I wouldn't be suprised if there's a blanket ban on all Chinese models. But nowadays models like tera/luna could fill this area of the pareto front, and LANL already runs openai models on their clusters [2]. Maybe it's in custom SFT/RL, for instrument control or sensitive topics? But you'll still have to compete with frontier models + a harness.
I would have also liked to see a carrot tied to their offer. It'll be hard to get teams to contribute RL gyms or curated text. But throw in a "we'll fund a postdoc/student to do that" and I think you'd have teams scrambling to apply.
[1] https://hpc.llnl.gov/about-livermore-computing/ai-ml-lc/lc-l...
[2] https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/articles/nnsas-los-alamos-nation...
- frumiousirc
There's no mention of "LLM" nor "language". It does mention "foundation model" which includes LLMs but that also includes non-LLM architectures and non-text data. Many of the Genesis Initiative proposals answer "foundation model" call with non-LLM systems. All the FM's I know about currently in this sphere are non-LLMs. The "about gs1" page also does not mention "LLM" but does talk more about agentic harness and workflows. That description certainly sounds LLM'ish but describes a more rich system. I don't mean to suggest that LLMs will not be part of these "genesis open models" but as described, this will not result in a replacement for the "claude" or "codex" commands.
- Aeroi
https://science.osti.gov/-/media/grants/pdf/foas/2026/DE-FOA...
- einpoklum
Instead of the department of energy striving to promote energy conservation and sustainable, non-polluting electricity generation, it is feeding the LLM craze. New department motto: "burn, baby, burn".
- an0malous
Do all these models have any significant architectural differences or training data sources? What are the factors going into the diversity of their performance?
- dangoljames
it's just a wall of blah blah until I see a gguf on hf
- andsoitis
Does Europe have an equivalent program?